


The Problem With War

by fadeverb



Series: Leo [5]
Category: In Nomine
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-27
Updated: 2013-07-27
Packaged: 2017-12-21 13:15:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 27,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/900731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fadeverb/pseuds/fadeverb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being a Renegade means dodging the Game, but sometimes it's not the demons who cause Leo the most trouble.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In Which I Am So Desperate I Will Let People Whine At Me

My not-quite-friend wears the body of a woman in her late twenties who looks to be mid-thirties, dark circles under her eyes and chewed fingernails. That's the one body she's wearing that I'm aware of; she's probably a rat and pigeon and dog too. "Thanks," she says, while the waitress takes away the cash I've handed her. "I appreciate it. Don't want to blow through this woman's money, but she could use a healthy meal."

"Not like I need the cash," I say. Too little to pay off anyone important, and I don't need food, so it's easy enough to spend money on someone else's goodwill. Because it's polite conversation to ask after these sorts of things, I follow up with, "How's she doing?"

"Better. Some." Nik sighs, arms spread along the back of the booth seat. "I hate Fleurity so much, some days. And to think, this is one of the _legal_ drugs. I dumped every bottle in the apartment the first day I took this host, but all I need to do is miss a repossession one time, and she has hours to go on another binge. I hate that it would be so easy." She checks her watch, the leather band dangling on a bony wrist. "I need to pick up the kids in fifteen. That's something. They've never loved their mom so much as they do now. But they don't trust the change will last."

"They don't love her," I say. "They love you, thinking you're her." I finish my coffee, and check the time myself. I have nowhere else to be, but I like knowing when I am. It's too easy for the time to turn into a background static without any commitments or schedule.

"Maybe you're right," Nik says, and her host's face sags further. "I don't know if I'm doing the right thing. It's harder, without a Superior giving me directions."

"You're hanging out with a demon," I say. "I doubt your old Archangel would approve. Why are you looking to me for moral advice? Remember the part where I'm on the other side?"

Nik snorts, and snaps the styrofoam container shut over her leftovers. "You're a Renegade, I'm an Outcast. Like sides _matter_ to us? You haven't been running around killing people for 'good reasons,' so you're ahead of several angels I used to know."

"Couldn't have been that bad," I say, in an innocent voice, because now I'm curious. "I mean, serving Heaven is supposed to be all peace and light, isn't it?"

Nik glares at me. She knows me well enough by now that she's not fooled by my innocent looks anymore. "Try saying that to a Seraph of the War. You really want to know when I went running?"

"Now that you mention it, sure." Especially now that she's implied it was a choice, and not the "Oops, tripped!" that most Outcasts work from. "Tell me, Nikostratos. How did you end up Outcast?"

"It was the politicking," Nik says, and pokes with her straw at the last traces of tea under the melting ice. She's turned mopey again, but she'll be gone in ten minutes so I can deal. We don't have these meetings for the pep talks. "I can handle that Archangels have different ways of seeing the world. Comes with the Word. I don't expect Heaven to be full of shiny happy people holding hands, right? But there was this kid near us--okay, he was probably older than I was, but a Servitor of Eli in a high school vessel, sweetest guy you'd ever meet, I think a Mercurian or a Cherub. Never did find out." She frowns to herself. "Can't remember his name now..."

I'm not in the mood to get into another discussion about Nik's run-in with Judgment that stripped a Force off her. "So what about this Creationer, whatever his name might have been?"

"He was organizing this peace rally for...whatever war was going on at the time. It's been a while, I'm fuzzy on the details. Vietnam, maybe? Or it could have been--" Nik shakes her head quickly, sending thin braids bouncing around her face. "Anyway. So I get word from on-high that no, we can't have _that_ , and I'm supposed to go make sure the peace rally breaks down. Not necessarily into violence, just making sure it gets bad press, isn't effective. Doesn't have an effect on the nearby Tether, because God forbid humans forget that war's keen. And I think to myself, wait a minute, I'm supposed to screw up another angel's attempt to serve God because of _politics_?"

"And you ditched?"

"Said, bugger this for a game of soldiers. That's the fun thing about the Sword's dissonance condition, Leo. All I had to do was disobey deliberately, on a few different points in succession, and, wham. Outcast. I let the Creationer know what was up, and then left. Didn't want to be part of that." Nik's acquired a full-scale brood. "Judgment throws a fit, because I happen to be serving God without the deliberate orders of an _Archangel_ , and while humans get praised to the sky for doing their best without guidance it's wrong when an angel does it, so then they go--"

"Hey, isn't it time for you to get the kids?"

Nik checks her watch, and goes pale. "You're right." She grabs her purse and leftovers. "Sorry, I need to run, I almost forgot traffic's this bad--oh, damn it, there's a fender-bender on the freeway, I'm going to need to take another route--"

"Don't apologize," I say, "just get out of here."

The Kyriotate blows me a kiss. "You're a good man, Leo."

I wait until she's out the door before I say, "No, I'm not."

I leave a larger tip on the table than the mediocre service justified, and head out.

Here's the thing about being a Renegade that I didn't consider before I broke my Heart, not that I was doing a lot of deep thinking in the few minutes between getting out of Trauma and running for Earth. The War wants me dead, and sends out people to track me down? That I was expecting. Last-minute runs for the border, the occasional frantic fight, misdirection and paranoia, all of that I _expected_. But I wasn't ready for how damn boring this would be.

I know celestials aren't supposed to get bored. Some demons have done a single job for thousands of years with no real concept of time. At the gates of Hell the Angels of Final Judgment stand forever, doing nothing but staring at damned souls to see who's heading the wrong way, and I can't imagine that's a thrill a minute. But me, I'm used to the way time flows for humans here on Earth, and I'm bored, bored, bored. I want to blow up a building, design a skyscraper, take a class in child psychology, plot the overthrow of the government, _something_.

Nik and I meet up so that she has someone to whine to, and so that I have something, anything to plan my days around.

No one's tried to kill me today, so boredom aside, I figure it's one of the better days. The weather's turned into a balmy spring wash that fits postcards better than reality, and at three in the afternoon there's not enough traffic on the sidewalks to hassle me. A pigeon on the sidewalk gives me a level look, and waggles a shimmery wing at me. I wave back to Nik as I pass. It does me no harm to be polite, and I'd rather have the local Kyriotate on my side, even if it's too small to yank my vessel around. There might be trouble if Nik ever realizes I'm a Calabite, and not the Impudite she's taken me to be, but I'll deal with that when it comes up.

Occasionally I'll steal a car, mostly when I'm fleeing one location for another, but I never keep them for long. Stolen plates are too easy to track. The last car I stole was a Humvee so new it still had the temporary tags on it, shiny black paint and a fake handicap mirror-hanger. When I finished with it, I stopped it at the top of a hill looking down into a ravine with the parking brake on and the car in fourth gear, stepped out, took off the brake, and let it speed into the ravine.

The disturbance was worth it.

In any case, I have no car today, and no urge to contribute to the local air pollution by acquiring one, which leaves me walking the sidewalks downtown. It would be safer if I lurked in hidden places except when forced to step out, but I'm short-sighted enough to give up dubious safety to avoid gnawing off my own hands out of frustrated boredom.

The main advantage of lingering in a college town is that no one gives me a second glance for walking around in fraying clothes. Comes with the Band, the way everything I touch falls apart. Everything falls apart anyway, but hanging around me speeds up the process. I'm used to it.

Three steps ahead of me on the sidewalk, some idiot college kid with clothes that aren't as unique as she wants to think they are and her nose in a book steps out onto the crosswalk, full in the path of a sports car doing fifteen mph over the speed limit. It probably won't kill her if it hits, but I'm not _sure_ , and that means I run to yank her to the sidewalk by her backpack before I can even process the odds. She yips like a small dog at the jerk, looks up from her book after the car zips by. "What--"

"Watch where you're going," I say. So I don't have to do it for you. My Discord settles back down now that I've fulfilled its requirements, and I can go on with the day, while yet another human has failed to maybe-possibly die because of me.

No wonder Nik believes I'm an Impudite. I'm not sure if that's hilarious, or so infuriating I want to break something. A little of both. Wanting to break something is, after all, my natural state of being.

A college-age couple walks past me, giggling into each other's faces and holding hands. I distract myself from depressing thoughts about my ex-girlfriend and what she'd do to me if she found me by checking passersby for signs of being celestials. The homeless man trying to pan-handle in the door of an abandoned shop may well be a Gamester, because you never know with those bastards, but he doesn't look up when I go by. Apparently I don't look charitable. The clean-cut young man with the square jaw of a future action hero could be serving the War, or a kid who believes strongly in shaving. I've run into people who wanted me dead four times since I ran Renegade--not counting when angels roped me into hunting down my old coworkers--and the two times I'm pretty sure they were looking for me, I didn't pick them out from the crowd on the street. No, I worked it out when they started shooting, or tried to melt my brains with a Song, or otherwise exhibited hostile signs. Which means studying people as I pass like it'll tell me something is pointless, but it keeps me occupied.

I need to start constructing a repertoire of happy fluffy memories to pull out whenever my mind decides it's time to brood. Cars I've destroyed, buildings I've designed, buildings I've blown up (usually not the same ones), and all the lit classes I took in college.

Wait, wait, _wait_. As long as I'm reminiscing about college, one of the college students in that touchy-feely couple seems familiar, and I can't place where. I walk faster, trying to drive memory through movement. The boy with the scraggly near-goatee: the last time I saw him he was clean-shaven, and...older? Either I'm thinking of an older relative, or I just walked by some celestial I ought to be able to pinpoint. It's too late to glance back without drawing attention, so I'm stuck with what I can remember from college. Not that annoying kid in the chemistry lab, not the TA for calculus, no one else in my major--

Right. The Mercurian of War who toasted Regan's first vessel while I ran away. I had a different vessel then, so he's unlikely to recognize me, but if he starts resonating people up and down the street, I may be in trouble. Okay, _more_ trouble, let's be precise. I've been living a trouble-free life since...never.

I take the next left and consider the possibilities. If he's younger than last time, that's probably not a long-term Role, which means even odds the girl hanging onto his shoulder is another angel. Might be in town on a long-term assignment, or he might be here for a specific reason. On the plus side, that's unlikely to involve me. On the minus side, Heaven's favorite military Archangel getting proactive in an area seldom makes for peace and quiet.

If there were a demonic Tether in town, I could assume they were heading that direction. But the reason I've stayed in this place so long is its apparent lack of Tethers. Nik says she hasn't found any either, and for all that she's good at playing the part of whatever human she's grabbed lately, she's a lousy flat-out liar. I wonder if I could skip town for a few weeks, and then come back; this place is growing on me, with how I haven't been shot at in nearly three months. I could ask Nik to keep an eye on these two, she'd appreciate the warning, and if they're on a temporary job, I could wander back into town as soon as they left.

A wave of disturbance rattles by me, and I'd go running, but it just...doesn't seem like it's worth the effort.

Oh. Song of Charm, Celestial version. With a great deal of Essence powering it, from what I could tell. Which means I have the willpower of a potted plant, as shown by the way I don't bother to move away when that cute giggly couple steps up to either side of me and guides me in another direction.

In a few minutes, I'm going to be angry about this. When I can get together enough effort to feel anything.

"If you'd turned right instead of left, you would have been walking _towards_ the car," the Mercurian says, a cheery voice to contrast his firm grip. "But you had to be difficult. Some people. Try not to make a scene when the Song wears off, okay? It's not in your best interests."

"It's not in my best interests to be going anywhere with you, either." I'm making no effort to do otherwise with one arm over my shoulder and one hand on my wrist guiding me briskly across the street and towards the aforementioned car.

"Of the two," says the Mercurian, "trust me, this is the best choice." The other possible-angel yanks open the door on a car idling in a no-parking zone, and I end up sitting next to her, the Mercurian on the other side of me. "Hit it," he says, and this turns out not to be instructions to commence a beating, but for the thin woman in the front to pull away like we're being chased by Vapulans.

Which is always a possibility.

"Great," says the Mercurian, such a _chipper_ voice he has, it makes me want to smack him. Oh, hey, volition returning. That's a good sign. Or it would be if I weren't already trapped in a car with these people. I wonder if that Mercurian Fell and I'm now surrounded by Servitors of the War, infernal flavor... Nah. They would have shot me. "Leo, let me introduce--you don't mind if I call you Leo, do you?--the rest of my associates. To your left you'll find Tessa, to the front you'll find Molly, and you can call me Sean. And before you ask, no, those aren't our real names, but they'll do for the moment. You're probably wondering how we knew--"

"Actually," I say, and lean back, resisting the urge to rub my forehead, "what I'm wondering is why a bunch of Servitors of Michael decided to grab me off the street instead of shooting me in the back. But don't let me interrupt the obligatory speech of gloating."

The Mercurian blinks at me, chipper fading into sulky. "I was not gloating."

"Yes, you were," murmurs the so-called Tessa next to me.

"...maybe a little bit." Sean unzips the backpack on the floor, and pulls out an ordinary brown file folder. "The point is, you're one Renegade Calabite of Fire, we know who you are and where you are, and--" He stops, and turns to frown at me. "Why would you say Servitors of Michael?"

"Because I met you in college." I slouch down in my seat, while the probably-Ofanite in the front drives in ways cars were not meant to be driven. "I had a different vessel at the time, you didn't."

"...oh." Sean flips through what I'm going to guess is my file. "...what did we do during the encounter?"

"You killed my girlfriend, while I ran for somewhere safe."

"I don't suppose you're still angry about that?" Sean asks, with a flickered look at Tessa. So that would be the Elohite in the car. Or Seraph? Doesn't sit right for a Seraph. Elohite, Ofanite, Mercurian... I might be off, but on no more than one.

"Not really," I say, and note the subtle nod Tessa gives as I say it. Bingo. "Served her right for picking a fight with the Host on the basis of your Choir. Mercurian, right?"

"You're ruining his flow," says Molly-the-Ofanite, running a red light with the casual disdain of a Windy. "You're supposed to be upset and startled while he details the vast amount of information he has on you. Now he's going to sulk for hours." Can't be that vast an amount of information if they believe I ran Renegade from Fire, and not the War.

"I am not," Sean snaps.

I shrug, and put on my seatbelt. "I could act more intimidated, if it would help. But if you're bothering to talk, you don't want to kill me immediately, so I don't see that I should start panicking. You want to tell me what the three of you want so desperately from me?"

Well, yes, the Elohite probably _can_ tell I'm not as apathetic as I'm pretending, but putting on the mask of boredom does wonders for reining in incipient fight-or-flight reactions. I can't do a useful thing with either. Yet.

"We need a Calabite," Sean says. "Renegades won't invoke Princes if we nab 'em, and we happened to have information on where to find you." He's _waiting_ for me to ask how he found me, and I'm not asking just to spite him. I let him linger on the suggested place for my questions, until he moves on. "You're in no position to--"

"Okay, Sean--you said to call you Sean, right?--can we assume that we've already gone through the death-and-torture threats, and move on to the scene where you tell me what you're offering? Because I'm threatened with death on a regular basis, and it's not providing motivation the way it used to." I would kick up my feet on the divider between the two front seats, but these _are_ the angels that are only distinguishable from Baalites by having feathers in their wings. That might be pressing my luck.

"Well..." Sean checks his notes. "The part where you don't die is a major bargaining point, but we're also willing to put in clauses about not being tortured until you change your mind."

"So noted. I don't suppose you're offering anything better?"

"We'll let you go when we're done?"

I close my eyes, and let a sigh hiss out between clenched teeth. When I can speak in a reasonable tone of voice again, I say, "I'm going to start cutting my own throat when angels show up, and save myself the trouble. This is the third time I've gotten that offer, and it's less attractive each time. You have neither a Trader nor a Seraph here to guarantee your promises. Can't you come up with something better?"

"I'm not in the habit of dealing with demons," Sean says, and I open my eyes again because I know that tone of voice, if not from him. It's the tone of voice that continues, _But I am rather adept at cutting off fingers, and willing to start._ Let's leave that unvoiced.

"Despite my best efforts, I'm in the habit of dealing with angels. So let's find a place that isn't rushing by us at 70 miles per hour, sit down, you tell me what you want out of me, and we can negotiate." I send Tessa a glower to match her stare, and she nods to Sean. So nice to know that the emotionless angel has decided I'm serious.

"We'll find a place, and talk," Sean says. "Fair enough." The edge has left his voice. If I'm still living on his sufferance, I've managed to delay the knives. "Molly! Find us a motel where no one will bother us?"

"Easy enough," the Ofanite says, and spins us in a sharp U-turn in the middle of the street. This is why I put on my seatbelt. I hate being stuck in a car with an Ofanite; they drive like their destination will escape if they don't chase it fast enough.

"Shouldn't take too long," Sean says. "A couple of days, maybe a week..." He's back to that chipper tone. "You didn't have any pressing appointments, did you?"

Besides the part where Nik will notice I don't show to our next meeting, and start panicking? "No," I say. "No appointments."


	2. In Which I Am An Obstinate Bastard, Having Little Reason To Be Otherwise

For someone who doesn't need to sleep, I spend a surprising amount of time in motels.

It makes sense: pay in cash, and you have an anonymous base of operations. For the Role-free celestial on the move, motels are the Swiss army knife of locations. Hide out of sight, scheme and plot, interrogate the Calabite you've tracked down... Where else can you get a locked and contained space so readily?

I'm back to my accustomed slouch on the bed, while Sean takes the desk chair, Tessa stands beside him with arms folded, and Molly goes Ofanite-pacing around the room. Sean watches me like he's working out a witty speech in his head, so I throw myself on the conversational grenade before he can try angelic humor. "Want to tell me what you need a Calabite for so?"

"You say this like we're going to give you information we don't have to," Sean says. He sits backwards in the chair, arms folded over the back, and I couldn't find a better example of a college student trying to look serious and down to earth if I tried. He's probably centuries older than I am, and has demonstrated his ability to beat up my ex-girlfriend in a fair fight, when Regan can beat _me_ up any day, but the pose amuses me. I wonder if that's deliberate.

"You're going to have to give me some indication of what you'd like me to do, if only so that I can tell you if it's possible," I point out, in my most reasonable tone of voice. "I don't know what half-assed set of data you're working from, but it's already off on at least one point. So why don't we cut to the chase, and you can give me whatever information I'd find out anyway once we get this project going."

"Mm. Let's see." Sean picks flakes of paint off the back of the chair while he thinks, and I spend my time resisting the urge to blast the lamp next to the bed with my resonance. Tense situations always make me want to blow something up. "We're going to be taking you to a Tether--"

"Oh. One of those projects." He really needs to stop giving me those annoyed looks every time I jump ahead of him. It's not my fault. He's the one treating me like an idiot. "You want to harass some Tether, but make it look like demons are behind the trouble, so you do the attack with a Calabite in the group, since that's the easiest demonic resonance for them to spot. Right?"

"...close enough," Sean finally says. He's glaring at me now, but it's not the variety of glare that promises blood and pain, so I don't care. "Think you can handle that?"

"Depends. Angelic Tether, or demonic one?"

"What kind of question is _that_?" asks Molly, rounding mid-stride to give me a whole new class of glare. She wears a bony vessel, all sharp points and angles that ought to seem awkward but don't. "You think we'd throw a Calabite against another Tether of Heaven?"

"Yes. I take it this one's infernal, then?" I look to Sean for the answer, and he frowns, but nods. "Great. Whose? There are a few types I'm not going to _touch_ , and I do mean that in the 'better off dead' sense." Heaven's War would jump Hell's version personally, not hide behind another demonic Word, but I'm not so sure they'd do the same for Fire or the Game. That's my top three of organizations I don't want to meet.

A fractional hesitation, and Sean says, "Nightmares." I'm not sure if that was from selecting a lie or wondering if he should tell me.

"Can't think of a better target for that game. Voted Most Likely To Take It Personally in her class for the last few millennia. Are you aiming her specifically at Fire, or sending her after other demons in general? Because this"--I demonstrate with a slight release of tension, entropy swirling out to make the lamp crumble in front of me, and Molly twitches while Sean frowns--"is a hint about my old allegiances. Unless you're planning on making enough disturbance that no one will notice I'm _not_." I love that attunement. It gets me out of trouble quietly at the best moments.

"It's not your concern," Sean says. "Trust me, you're better off not knowing. All you need to do is show up at the right place, throw your resonance around long enough that people notice, and be done with it."

"Got it." I examine my fingernails, and work through the implications during the pause. Servitors of Michael can't retreat from conflict, which means they can't do a pseudo-aborted hit with a wash of Calabite resonance to make things look effective. Meaning they're probably going to do a clean sweep of the place before retreating, and that'll conflict with the Discord I picked up. Springing that on them mid-fight will more likely get me killed than the amusement is worth. "Were you planning on leaving people alive to tell the tale of big bad demons knocking down the door, or did you figure the evidence at hand and testimony when they exited Trauma would suffice?"

"I told you," says Sean, fingers tapping along the back of the chair, "you don't want to know the details. Why do you keep asking?"

It would be imprudent to say _Because I think I can plan this better than you can._ True, but imprudent. I settle for, "Because if you want to run around killing people, there's only so much I can do to help you there."

He raises a single eyebrow. It's the kind of move people practice in mirrors. I'm liking Sean less the longer I know him, and he's only implied death threats twice. "Don't you think it's late in the game to develop moral restraint? Or do you have objections to killing off other demons?"

"Moral restraint nothing, I'm talking about the Discord that dropped on me when I broke my Heart." Will I get credit for giving them information for free? No, because they're assholes who think it's their due. "I can't help you kill people. Sorry. I hope that wasn't an important part of the plan."

Sean stares at me for a long moment. I smile cheerfully back. "We can work with this," he says. "If you can cause enough _property_ damage in plain view, the rest of us can take care of the Tether staff." Which he seems quite confident about; I ratchet up my estimation of their strength. I wouldn't attack even a weak Tether with two coworkers at my back. Okay, I wouldn't attack a Tether on general self-preservation principles, given the choice, but since when do I get a choice? Thus the whole Renegade issue. I wonder if Lilith approves of Renegades, or if Freedom doesn't cover us.

I try rephrasing. "I can't help _you_ kill anyone, either."

Sean shrugs. "If you're worried about defending yourself, we can keep you in the back."

"How reassuring." So they're making me be explicit. It's not that I'm proud of everything I've done in my life, but this, the one thing that's least my responsibility, is the most embarrassing. "The problem, however, is this: I can't _let_ you kill people."

The blank look I receive from Sean is nearly as gratifying as Molly's pause in her pacing to stare at me.

"...could you explain this?" Sean says, finally. "Because I think I...must have misunderstood."

I take my joy in life where I can. "It's like this," I say, patiently and slowly. "When I broke my Heart, I picked up some Discord. Because the universe is like this, I ended up with Discord that keeps me from killing people, or letting _other_ people kill anyone." I smile at Sean. "Think of it as similar to the Impudite dissonance condition."

"That only applies to humans," Sean says. Is that an edge of desperate hope in his voice? I can wish. "The Tether staff should be mostly celestial."

"Similar to," I say. "Not identical to. Experience tells me that trying to kill celestials is also right out. No matter how much I might want to do so, or let it happen." Okay, truth be told, if I slam enough Essence into fighting the Discord, I can manage... But it's no easy struggle, and I don't intend to bring that up until it benefits me.

"I can't believe this," Sean says, no longer talking to me. "We go find a Calabite of Fire, a Renegade _Calabite_ of _Fire_ , and we get the one fucking defective Destroyer out there! How am I supposed to work with this?"

"Hey! My resonance works fine," I say. "Nothing defective there. Just inconvenient for you. Maybe you should've done more research."

"It was good research! The oldest information we have on you is two years old, and most demons don't go pick up a tactic-warping Discord in that little time." Sean pinches the bridge of his nose. "Okay, we can work with this. Somehow. Any other surprises you want to drop on us? Have you somehow, against all the laws of nature, managed to acquire the Seraph of Flowers attunement during the last year? Other entertaining Discord? Personal grudges from Nightmares?"

Lines twist together inside my head, from point to point of information, until knots of supposition and hypotheses form. "Who did Solveig end up redeeming to?"

Sean blinks at me. Twice. "Okay," he says. "You have to stop doing that."

"Can't help it. But if it'll make you feel better, I can pretend to be stupid." I have such a pleasant smile. It's good for concealing seething rage. Elohim aside. "I'd guess the Sword, as last time I saw him he was probably being manipulated by Judgment, and I'm your Archangel doesn't get along with Judges. But they're buddies with Swordies, who are buddies with you. I could be wrong. I'm only guessing." Sean has two fingers pressed to the bridge of his nose. Poor Mercurian. It's always troublesome when your prisoners figure out things you didn't want them to. "If it makes you feel any better, until I ran into you three, I'd assumed he'd been killed by that flock of Malakim." Flock? What do you call a collection of Malakim, anyway? They're probably a murder, like crows.

"Oh, I'm _filled_ with reassurance," Sean says. His eyes are closed now, and I get the impression that if I weren't in the room, he'd be beating his head against a wall. "No other big surprises?"

"I don't know the details of your plan. How should I know?" I watch Molly's pacing, working out the patterns that aren't immediately visible. Keeping between me and the other two angels, me and the door. Like I'd be stupid enough to try anything. She'd be better off watching the door for signs of anyone coming in. "On the off chance that it's relevant, I'll note that you got the Word wrong. I went Renegade from the War, not Fire."

Sean opens his eyes. "Really. When did that transfer happen?"

"Approximately five minutes before I went Renegade." Let them make of that what they will; I don't think they're clever enough to work out the implications. "Let's get back to the point. You want my help on this Tether raid. You don't have many Calabim handy, and there's a time limit, or you wouldn't be trying to work around my Discord. Dumping my vessel into the Tether wouldn't convince anyone this is an intra-Hell fight, especially once they identified me. So. What are you going to offer me?"

"We could Sing you into cooperation," Sean says.

"Sure. For a minute or so at a time, and a heavy Essence investment. I wouldn't be able to use my resonance, which would defeat the purpose." I fold my arms, obligatory sign of stubborn determination in this culture. "Make me an offer, Sean."

I have no way of holding them to anything they promise. I don't even expect them to try to make good. But I'll take what I can get, and right now? Making these angels bend to suit my demands is the best I can get.


	3. An Interlude, In Which, Contrary To All Sense Or Reason, I Have A Friend

"Sing me to sleep, Mommy." The boy said it in the same sleepy tone as he'd asked for the glass of water, bedtime story, one more cartoon before bed.

"What do you want me to sing?" Nikostratos asked, and kissed the child who wasn't hers on the forehead. Fifty miles away, she wheeled through the night on the wings of a year-old grackle, following the bright red tail lights of a sedan.

"Our song," said the boy, sweet and demanding. "The special one."

Nik slipped a Force into the hamster curled up in bed of pine shavings, and let go of the woman. In the cage, the Kyriotate leapt up onto the wheel to pace, and ponder, while the two humans continued their conversation. Nik matched her four feet's rhythm to the soft, off-key song coming from the woman in the room. "Sleep my child and peace attend thee, all through the night. Guardian angels God will send thee, all through the night."

Far away and high in the sky, Nik saw the car pull off into a dark parking lot, the headlights snapping off. She perched on a telephone wire, found a rat to leap into, and scuttled towards the car as she watched from above.

"I fail to see the reason for these games," Leo said, stepping out of the car with angels to his left and right, angels before him and behind him in the shadows and watching overhead. Nik took her rat-host closer, under car carriages where the world turned to the smell of gasoline and dirty oil. "If you want a Tether gone, blow the damn thing up yourself."

"Spoken like a true Destroyer," said the thin angel with sharp movements. Back in the bedroom, the human woman of uncertain memory sang, "Soft the drowsy hours are creeping, hill and dale in slumber sleeping, I my loved ones' watch am keeping, all through the night."

"And you're surprised by this?" Leo's hands rested tight in his pockets, and Nik clicked her beak together up on the telephone wire. Nothing in life was fair, but it didn't mean people had to make it more so. Why couldn't they leave a demon who wasn't hurting anyone alone? She crept closer below, behind a tire of the car they'd been driving, shoes stomping across the pavement in front of her. So he was a Calabite, not what she'd thought, but what of it? He wasn't doing anything wrong. It wasn't his fault he'd been made in Hell. They should speak with him reasonably, not push him around with their Songs and threats of violence.

"Destroying it isn't the point," said the angel with the handsome young vessel, moving away from the car. "You can't simply blow Tethers apart on a whim, or the situation escalates. This is a _cold_ war. Stop trying to second-guess our motives and cooperate."

"That's the deal," said Leo. Nik turned her wheel in a squeaky counterpoint to the woman's singing, and wondered about deals. Dealing with the devil referred to the forces of Hell, not those of Heaven. Warriors were always angels of uncertain honor, even the Malakim, prone to redefining the rules until their definition of honor was equal to winning and nothing more holy. What assurances could angels give to a demon that he'd believe? Or did Leo think all angels to be as reliable as she was? She hadn't meant to give that impression, much as she spoke of the glories of Heaven.

"Angels watching all around thee, all through the night," sang the woman, throat scratchy from the abuses that body'd been put through. The child in bed had his eyes closed, breathing not regular enough to be asleep yet. "Midnight slumber close surround thee, all through the night." Nik followed demon and angels across the parking lot, moving from shadow to shadow, and sent her bird-host flying to another telephone wire as the group moved out of sight from that viewpoint. She was hard-pressed to keep up in her rat host, tiny legs churning with all the power of an angel of God to keep up with those human-vesseled celestials.

"Soft the drowsy hours are creeping, hill and dale in slumber sleeping, I my loved ones' watch am keeping, all through the night." The woman stood up, and tapped at the hamster's water bottle. Nik stopped running on the wheel to scamper over and look cute. "Shush," the woman said quietly. "My baby's trying to sleep."

Nik curled up in a ball in the corner of the cage, listening for the sound of the front door opening once the woman left the room. Don't go out into the dark night, don't go down to the liquor store, don't wonder why you remember so little of this day. Your guardian angel is no Cherub, and can only do so much.

In a gutter at the edge of the parking lot, Nik picked up another rat for a fourth host, and begin to triangulate, watching overhead as she dangled from the sky on fragile blue-black wings. What have you gotten yourself into, Leo? There are dangerous creatures in the night, and your guardian angel is no Cherub. I can only do so much.


	4. In Which None Of This Is My Fault

The house we're watching from behind a hedge has broken, boarded windows and a gaping entrance where the door hangs from one hinge. "Spooky," I say, and shut up when Molly glares at me. In the dark, it's a classic haunted house, and I wouldn't put it past the Princess of Nightmares to stock the place with ethereal monsters to keep the fear alive. We've spent most of the night getting here and into position in a way that pleases these angels, and I'm nearly bored enough to not be afraid.

"Three known Tether staff," Sean tells me, so close when he whispers in my ear that there's hot breath running down my neck. "None of them will lose a vessel while you're there to get fussy about it, but you _will_ make sure two of them see you blasting. Understood? Anyone else who happens to be around is a bonus."

"I understood the first three times," I say, not bothering to whisper. Anything that can hear me from this distance would catch the whispers. The implication that they'll be offing people when I'm not looking bothers me like someone hissing in my ear. "And the part where I stick to Tessa, and the part where the two of us use the back door, _yes_ , I get the picture. What do you want, a recap in interpretive dance?"

"I'd pay to see that," Molly murmurs, and then shuts up with a sharp white grin against the night.

"Seven minutes," Sean says. "Mark." He and Molly scramble off in one direction while I follow Tessa in another.

The end of our attempt at stealth dumps us over the fence into the back yard, towards a locked and boarded door, in direct contrast to the front. It's a strategic move, from what little I understand of them: provide an obvious entrance, and concentrate your defenses there instead of trying to guard every potential gap. In our case, it means the Ofanite and Mercurian get to be distracting until Tessa's taken me far enough inside to make a scene. Regan would find it hilarious that the Calabite in this group is the weakest fighter, but she always had an evil sense of humor. Especially when it was humor at my expense.

Damn, but I miss her.

Light shines through the cracks of a back window, dim and flickering. Tessa stalks forward across the lawn, confident in a lack of watchers over this stretch, with a motion for me to follow. As we hit the wall of the house, we both drop under window level.

Tessa holds up two fingers. She slides up against the wall to peer in through the window, slides back down again, face blank as always. "One of them not Tether staff," she murmurs. "No concern of yours. Focus on structural damage."

"I _know_." She presses one finger to her lips, and I drop my voice further. "How much longer?"

Tessa checks her watch, a faint flash of blue from the face. "Too late to change the plan," she says. "On my mark, the door."

I can't get through that entire door with one blast of resonance: in tune with the corporeal world and how to pull it apart I am not, unless you add high explosives to the mix. Too late to point this out, either. "Mark," she says, and I push entropy at the door, focusing on the lock. It's only wood and metal, rot and rust get to them, so if they arrive _sooner_ , that's how the world chooses to work. The natural end-state of the world loves what I do.

The door swings open at Tessa's kick, as a sleek gun sleek appears in her hands. So they're loaded with summonable artifacts for this job? No surprise. I chase after her more from Discord pressure (she's probably not planning to speak nicely to anyone with _that_ ) than from any agreements I made with Sean.

Inside, two women stand as we burst in, the one with her back to the door turning to face me: she looks like a school teacher, pleasant round face and wearing a vest with dogs stitched in. Her head disappears into a shower of blood, bone, and brain, before I can even _think_ about anything, and I whirl out my resonance at the gas lamp still flickering on the table. Glass explodes out at the dead body, the stringy-haired other woman leaps at us, and this one looks to be one of Beleth's projects, with a rolling milky eye and a butcher's knife in her hand. There's a racket at the front of the house, and disturbance vibrating around me, but I'm concerned with keeping up my half the bargain while not letting the insane Elohite next to me shoot anyone else.

The flame from the broken lamp flickers madly in the wind, while the demon dodges the next snap of bullets to slide under the table. I remove two table legs from the equation, leaving us in a dark room full of broken bits of glass and wood. Tessa yanks me further into the house, her free hand wrapped around my wrist. "Further in," she hisses to me, while the demon in the dark begins shouting curses at us in Helltongue. Not creative cursing, to be honest: it's the standard fare involving sexual acts with Archangels and disfavored Demon Princes.

Further inside's no brighter, but Tessa's better than I am at seeing in the dark. "Door," she says, nearly slamming me into it, and I throw a burst of resonance at the darkest shape (everything here is dark) in front of me, listen to splinters patter onto the floor. Then we're running downstairs into a basement, the smell of blood and rotting meat swelling up to gag me. Damn vessels for actually needing air, and these angels for getting me into a stench this bad. I'm going to need a shower. 

If Sean's big plan for avoiding problems with my Discord is to make sure I have no idea what's happening around me... it's working. There's enough disturbance rippling past me from multiple directions that I can't tell who's doing what, I can't see a damn thing in front of my face, and I think that was the Song of Thunder that went by upstairs.

The light switches on. Whoever designed the basement watched too many cheap horror movies: the walls are lined with animal parts, skins and limbs and the gristle of a dozen family pets. My shoes stick to the dried blood on the concrete floor. More importantly, we have a knife-wielding psycho running down the stairs, and two grotesque bloody-muzzled deformed dogs lunging at us from where they're chained to the wall--no, wait, from where they were lying next to the wall, with chains attached to the collars around their necks. No actual chain-fastening occurred. That makes things more fun. I delete a section of stairs under the woman's feet, and try to deal with the demonling Hell hounds without killing them.

Tessa aims for their legs, some small comfort: I won't try to wrestle the gun away from her yet. One dog collapses in a broken heap as the other one lunges for me, foaming at the mouth. Some people have no sense of subtlety. The bare light bulb overhead flickers madly, fulfilling the poor ambient light quotient for this part of the house, and I do my best to kick the oncoming dog while Tessa deals with the demon stuck in the stairs.

Did I mention corporeal fighting isn't one of my strong points? I end up with teeth snapping at my shoelaces for the trouble. "Intruders," growls the dog, ignoring its fallen partner.

"That was the idea, yes," I say, and hazard a whirl of resonance at the dog itself. I'm lucky enough to force it past its corporeal connection, sending bloody flecks into the foam along its muzzle. "What are you planning on being when you grow up, puppy? Djinn?"

"Calabite," it snarls, and ducks in for a bite that I'm not fast enough to avoid, though all it leaves me with is ripped pants and a stinging scrape below one knee.

"Not a bad choice." I back towards the stairs, risk a glance to see Tessa slam her gun into the trapped demon's head. Not deadly, I think. I can ignore it. "You know," I add, "if you cut and run now, you can _claim_ you were injured in the fighting, and no one's likely to double-check."

"I'm no coward." The dog leaps for my throat, I dive for the ground, and by the time I'm back on my feet it's between me and the Elohite, red-foamed and determined.

"Pity," I say. "It's a healthier career choice." I resonate the little pest again. This must be my lucky day, because the dog collapses onto the floor coughing, deformed legs pawing furrows in the ground.

"It's enough," Tessa says, and yanks me to the stairs by one hand. I jump over the dog on the way, then over the missing stairs. "Regrouping upstairs. Stay close."

"How about we regroup about three miles away, in a moving vehicle?" I'm sorry to leave even the uncertain light of that basement for the dark of the upstairs again. "Say, before someone _big_ shows up."

"Not yet." Tessa pulls me as close as a hug, and sings Shields, whirling air spinning around us as something massive, I can't tell what, bounces off. Thanks?

We've made a racket, inconvenienced the Tether staff, and shown off the "Hello I'm a Calabite here to resonate things" act several times over. If I weren't so busy hoping to live through this, I'd be curious as to what they want from this project. I toss a burst of resonance at the blurry shape, feel my entropy surge back as that demon or whatever rejects it, redirect to the floor beneath it. The dark shape plummets into the basement below. Thin old floorboards that aren't hard to break... I love that trick. I should be allowed to fight all the people who want to kill me in houses with poor structural integrity.

Molly dashes into the room, a pointy red-haired shape in the doorway. "Got it," she says, not clarifying what. So this particular Tether raid involved looting the place's store of artifacts, along with general mayhem. "Sean's dealing with the Seneschal--" The Ofanite flickers a glance at me, and finishes, awkwardly, "In the non-lethal sense, mostly, but I give her fifteen more seconds before running back for reinforcements." Another burst of gunfire from upstairs, and the Discord's making me twitchy over it. "You?"

"Ready to go," Tessa says, and then that's Sean running through the door, remnants of the green-tinged Ethereal Shields disappearing around him. He has a backpack slung over his back, and blood runs from a cut on his face. "Objective complete, enemy neutralized, orders say _run_ ," and this is the first order I've gotten in a long time that I'm happy with.

"Should've set the place on fire," Molly says, darting ahead of us to the back door. "That'd keep them busy."

"That'd make enough disturbance to shake...other places," Sean says, curtly enough that I gather there are angelic Tethers in the area as well and he's not wanting to mention that in front of me. He skids to a stop in the room Tessa and I entered through, staring down at the bloody shape on the floor of the one person my Discord is still griping about. "What the fuck happened here?"

"Later," Tessa says, yanks me along by one wrist until we're out in the back yard again. Behind us, disturbance swells up, the sound of large celestials forcing their way to Earth through a narrow Tether. "No time now."

"Later," Sean agrees, in a voice that promises a good shouting to _someone_ , possibly even not me, and we scramble over the back fence to where Molly...isn't waiting, but has run off to grab the car. "Why did you--"

" _Later_ , sir," Tessa snaps back, and that's enough to shut up even Sean for the moment.

The moment lasts for ten minutes, long enough for Molly to find the highway, Tessa and Sean on either side of me in the back seat. How cozy. "Fine," Sean says, leaning in front of me, and I slump down so that the two angels can have their chat from either side of me. I couldn't have been given a window seat? I'm not stupid enough to leap from a moving car when the car is full of Servitors of War. "What happened?"

"The situation changed," Tessa says. "There wasn't time to alert you."

"She wasn't supposed to _be_ there tonight." Sean's speaking in short, clipped words, as if he wants to say a great deal more and has to edit. I feign sulky boredom and listen.

"With all due respect, sir," and I'm sure the Elohite's sudden use of the honorific is as pointed and deliberate as I read, "that doesn't change that she was, indeed, there. Removing her was necessary to avoid compromising the security of--"

"We don't shoot other angels!" Sean shouts across me, as if he's forgotten I'm there. Fine by me. "No matter how inconvenient they may be to our plans, and I don't care who it is she served, even she were serving the Hyena himself--"

"Sir!" When an Elohite shouts back, it does so for a reason. Tessa continues in a level voice, face blank in contrast to Sean's distinct "you are in so much trouble" emoting. "This is not the time or place to discuss mission parameters."

Sean looks at me. Yes, I'm still here. And then back at Tessa. When he begins speaking again, it's an ear-jarring slurred song, too fast for me to follow, like Helltongue set to music and run at high speed. So that's what angelic sounds like, on the corporeal plane. I can't follow a conversation made in a language I can't understand. Time to review the lecture on the abilities of angels of War I got while working for Baal. So Sean's a Vassal? It makes sense that if a Mercurian's commanding two other angels, he'd have a distinction. Whether he might have higher than that... probably not relevant. When I know someone can beat me to a pulp, the finer degrees of how quickly and how well become unimportant.

I wonder if Sean intends to keep his half of the bargain. I have no way of enforcing it. It would be nice to receive a pleasant surprise for once.

After half an hour of Sean's discussion with Tessa--which is to say, long streams of rapid angelic and terse replies from her that I can't decipher without their context--the conversation dies off, and I'm left in a silence that manages to be more uncomfortable than before.

We're taking back roads. I know where this is going.

"How long until dawn?" Sean asks.

"Maybe an hour and a half, two hours." Molly's driving slowly now, even an Ofanite taking care on bumpy roads that haven't been repaved in decades. "We should've set the place on fire, while we left," she says. "Probably wouldn't break any local Tethers, and if it did, so what? Nothing worth keeping in the area."

"Just drive," Sean says. He sounds tired. I can identify. But not sympathize, because this mess is of his own making. He doesn't even take pleasure in spreading his problems to anyone else, no, wears his martyrdom and responsibility like a medal. Dedication to unpleasant work because it's your duty doesn't impress me.

Molly pulls to the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere on a hillside covered in trees. Take this road another hour up and you'd reach cabins, tiny wood and stone buildings with no electricity. It would seem I don't warrant the expense of that. I follow Tessa out of the car, stare into the dark while Sean and Molly follow. That I can see anything at all once the headlights snap off means dawn's approaching. So all of the angels who've spent Essence on the fight tonight will be one fuller soon, and I'll be at just as much of a disadvantage as before. Lovely.

I don't know why I keep running the odds. I'm not winning this.

"Come on," Sean says, and slings an arm over my shoulders, faux companionship. The way Tessa yanked me around by a wrist was more honest. "Time for us to talk."

We step off the road and into the woods, brushing between low-hanging branches I can barely see. "If I recall our agreement," I say, "this is the part where you drop me off and keep on driving."

"You know what they say." Molly and Tessa are behind us, but I can't tell where. One more illusion of privacy. "No plan survives contact with the enemy."

"Or with an inconveniently placed ally." I'd kill to have a Seraph here instead of...any of these. With a Seraph, you know where you stand. That place might be at the other end of a sword and no mercy, but there's no pretending it's otherwise. "So this is the part where you explain that you're not holding to your part of the deal, but for _holy_ reasons."

"Fuck holy, Leo. I'm a practical man. Practical tells me that you know too much sensitive information to let you go running free, no matter what we said before." Am I supposed to feel better about this because he says it apologetically? I don't. "Furthermore, I don't believe you'd keep quiet if you ran into trouble where it might be useful."

"True enough," I say. "Now we find a quiet spot where no one's going to run into the body too soon."

"That's the idea. Compared to some of the alternatives, Limbo's not that bad."

"I could drop out of it again in a week."

"Unlikely." Sean understands me a little too well. "You're not the kind to scrape up the Essence for a Discord-loaded rat vessel. Not when you know we could find you again. You're smart enough to stay in Limbo for long enough to afford a real replacement, and not come back on Earth until you're sure we won't mind."

"You're awfully confident in predicting my behavior." I wish he'd let go of me. I can walk forward through the trees to my own death without this guidance. And what's one more vessel? Curl up in the not-cold not-dark nothing of Limbo that I've only heard about, spend months dreaming of revenge. No one else would notice, and it's one place where I'm safe from my old coworkers.

Nik will notice. But she'll get over it. She has her own problems to worry about and projects to oversee.

"I'm a Mercurian," Sean says. The sky's tinged lighter, enough that I'm no longer tripping over the rough ground. "Reading people is one thing I do, and Tessa reads people another way again. In this, yes, I think I know what you'd do."

"How convenient." I don't care that the Elohite can read my anger: I keep my voice airy and bored. I won't give these angels the satisfaction of watching me rage against the inevitable.

Sean pulls away his arm, steps forward to face me. He has a polite gun, ordinary and slightly shiny in the near-dawn, that isn't yet pointed at me. "Shut up," he says, "and listen to me for a minute, without giving me the running commentary to prove how disaffected and cynical you are, okay? Because I'm going to make you an offer."

"What, as good as the last offer I got from you? Excuse me if I'm not holding my breath."

"Listen," Sean says, the gun held loosely in his hands. Regan holds her guns that way, for ease of snappy aiming. "Here's one more option. You're not stupid, you're not pointlessly destructive or self-destructive. You can work in a team, and you have some potential. If you choose to--"

"I can come back you to a Tether where you tie me down and have someone talk sense into me? I'm sorry, Sean, but I'm not interested in playing that game, especially the ending where someone drags me celestial and kills me permanently." I am, maybe, snarling.

"You could be something more." He means it, or fakes it well, actual intensity behind what he says. All of this is ludicrous. "Haven't you ever thought about it?"

"No, they beat that out of us early on. I'm a Calabite. I've always been one, and I don't see it changing. I like being a Calabite." This is a pointless argument, and if he hasn't figured that out yet, he's stupider than I thought. But propaganda can make a guy stubborn.

"You can't run Renegade forever, Leo," he says. Poor Mercurian, like I didn't know that. "They'll catch up with you, and they will kill you."

"I was aware of that when I broke my Heart." Not consciously, in that strange rushed decision, but I knew it. The War or the Game or Fire coming down to catch me, there's no forever in trying to break Hell's rules. "I've served the War. I'll take my chances against destruction before I'll serve it again, whether it's Heaven's version or Hell's."

"We are not like them," Sean says, effort on his face to not shout.

"You're exactly like them!" I, however, might as well shout if I feel like it, and I do. "Why can you get away with blaming that attack on Hell? Because you're doing the exact same thing Hell would, and why should I care if you claim to have better motivations? You'll kill off your own side as quickly as Baal will if it suits your ends. There's as much difference between Servitors of Michael and those of Baal as there is between the red and blue teams when he divides them up to attack each other in Gehenna. You can both talk about honor for just as long, and break your promises just as fast when it's _practical_ for you."

"I am trying to give you a _choice_!"

And now that he's shouting... I don't need to. "No," I say. "You're trying to make yourself feel better about breaking your promises. So that you can say I chose this, and it wasn't really your fault."

There's a small, furry weight on my shoe, running up my ankle. Nik, what are you doing here? Get out of this before someone sees you. Sean stares at me like I've gone and hurt his feelings, and he's still going to shoot me. 

"I'd rather deal with Judgment," I say. "They want to kill me too, but they're honest about it."

Even if I tried to run, Molly's too fast, Sean's right by me. Nowhere to go, and Nik's tugging at my pants with mouse teeth, as if it would do any good. Stupid Kyriotate. Go spend your concern on people who can appreciate it.

"Your choice, my choice," Sean says, such a tired voice, like I should care that he's had a bad night. "Maybe the difference isn't important. You had to know that it would end like this."

"I wouldn't call it a surprise."

And Molly shouts out, drawing attention from both of us, as a bear swipes at her.

Nik, you're an _idiot_.

And all I need is that moment when they're all turned, reaching for weapons and suddenly off-guard, to throw half my Essence into the one Song I'm anywhere near good at, and turn into shadows.

Good thing the sun's not all the way up.

I'm running before the Song even catches hold, Nik clinging to the laces of my left shoe while I do my damned best to not make noise. It's not as if they don't _notice_ I'm gone, but they have a bear attempting to gnaw Molly's head off, and I've become used to running away of late. Maybe more often through cities than forests, but the principle's the same. I slide and skid and run, away from the car they'll believe I'm seeking.

The Song fades away, minutes later, and I don't slow down. Being celestial means never having to say "I'm tired."

"Nik," I say, because if they're close enough to hear me talking, I'm already screwed. "Find someone nearby, but not on the same roads we followed up. Someone alone in a car. Grab that person, and get me a ride, because they'll track me again the way they did the first time, and I don't have much time."

The Kyriotate scampers into the hand I offer her mouse host, nose twitching. "Don't worry," I say. "I'm not going to do anything stupid. But when I'm pressed into a corner, fight or flight narrows down to one option."

Nik squeaks dubiously at me, but after a few minutes, she points me in a different direction. "I owe you one," I say to the mouse riding on my shoulder, and head on down the hill towards my new ride.

She shrugs as eloquently as a Kyriotate in a mouse can.


	5. In Which I Take Things Personally

By the time I'm out of the shower, a luxury I don't have time for but indulged in anyway, Nik's dredged up a human host, and she's sitting on the motel room's one dingy bed, searching her host's pockets. This one looks to be a junkie, thin and pale with an unfortunate nose and the kind of mouth that would smile nicely if she remembered how. Nik does smile up at me, an uncertain look. "How are you feeling?"

"Like I spent an hour running through a forest, after an assault on a Nightmares Tether. Also, I'm maybe a little bit annoyed." My clothes are dirty, but my clothes are _always_ dirty, so this is nothing new. For once the wear and tear on them is more the product of environment than my own entropy. "Depending on how many friendly Tethers they have in the area, it's going to take a few more hours before they can track me down again. I hope. I could be guessing wrong on how they did it last time."

"There's a Destiny Tether near that Nightmares one," Nik says, playing with the bangles on her wrist. "That's the closest angelic one I know. They probably wouldn't use that one, though, unless they were desperate."

"Desperate, yes. Likely to use a Destiny Tether? I don't think so." I connect the dots, and find I don't have enough to be _sure_ of my conclusions, but certain hypotheses are looking strong. What kind of angel hangs around an infernal Tether? A stupid one, an overconfident one, or maybe one who's so harmless they'll let her in for the mocking and not realize they're being caught by the wear of words. People underestimate what you can do with conversation alone. Still, I shouldn't form conclusions based on such scanty evidence; better to imply I know something than risk proving I don't. I grab the legal pad I picked up at a convenience store, and sit down next to Nik. "How are you managing? Got all your hosts out of that tussle safely?"

"Most of them." Nik slides across the bed to lean against me, one dirty arm looping with mine. "I used Healing on the bear, but it wasn't quite enough, and I _had_ to run, I couldn't risk being trapped there."

"I'm sorry, Nik. Didn't mean for you to take dissonance on my account." I have exactly one ally right now, which is one more than I'd realized I had, and I have no intention of risking that. Besides, I _can_ identify with how painful dissonance is. And for an Outcast angel, increased dissonance risks more than another helping of Discord. "Thank you for coming to rescue me. I wasn't expecting that."

"You should've been," Nik says. "I'm your friend, I'm not going to let _them_ go shoot you when you didn't do anything wrong. Watching out for people is what friends do."

In my experience, friends set you up to get killed instead of them, and then try to convince you it's for the best when you show up later. Or maybe that's just my ex-girlfriend. "I'm not used to having friends who back me up. It'll take some getting used to."

The Kyriotate sprawls out with her head in my lap. "We're not all like that, you know. Not all of us break our promises. I don't want you to think that all angels are dishonorable."

Memory of Katherine curled up in the back seat, asleep in the car while Regan and I drove on to our next assignment. Tiny human bundle of destructive urges and innocence. But neither Nik nor her host are like that, and Katherine's safely given to the keeping of angels. I don't have to think about her anymore. I don't _want_ to think about her anymore. "I know you wouldn't do anything like that, Nik."

"I wouldn't, but that's not what I mean." She rolls over to look up at me, my strange friend staring at me from behind someone else's eyes. "Just because I don't want to serve the Sword anymore, and Warriors are a bunch of lying sneaky bastards, it doesn't mean all of Heaven's...someone you wouldn't like."

"I don't have time for the Choose Redemption speech," I say, as kindly as I can manage through my own irritation. "Right now, I'm planning how not to get killed by those Warriors once they catch up with me, and they _will_ be catching up, Nik. You bought me some time. I ought to make good use of it."

"We should find a more defensible position," Nik says, springing to her feet, and for the first time I can see a hint of Swordie in how she looks around the room. "Some place with better back exits, for one. Ofanite of War means they'll always shoot first in a fair confrontation, so if we keep moving and make sure we have cover--"

"We can't fight them. Not like that." I sort through the pens in my jacket pockets, looking for one that still works. "Two of us, three of them."

"I can be in more than one place at a time," Nik says, and it's bizarre and sweet that she's offering to fight for me, but impractical.

"Sure you can. But all they need to do is kill me once, and you have hosts to protect, and these are _Warriors_ , Nik. Fighting is what they do. Me? I'm a Calabite who knows how to stay out of fights, the better not to get killed. If it turns physical, we've lost." The green pen that I got from I don't remember where works. Good. I begin writing out what I have to say to the first set of people who might be interested. "So we don't let it go physical."

"If we start running now--"

"That's back to physical. So long as they have a way of tracking me reliably, and they're willing to keep using it, I'm screwed." I'm also lucky that it seems no Baalite found the same trace route these angels have. Or maybe they didn't care enough to bother. Dig up the blueprints I made for a few buildings I designed, and I'll bet that's enough of a connection to use the right Song of Affinity and get a limited-time pointer to where I'm standing. "Do you know of any Judgment Tethers nearby? Or even _not_ nearby, just close enough that we could get a document there fast."

"I don't want to get near Judgment," Nik whispers.

"No, we're not getting _you_ anywhere near it. I wouldn't ask you to risk that." Well, yes I would, if I were desperate enough and thought I could be convincing. But I'm not to that point. "All I need to know is where to mail things, and if you could make sure what I mailed got there."

"I know of...a few Judgment Tethers," Nik admits, pacing the room like an Ofanite while she talks. "Get me what you want sent there, and I can get it to them. It's not that hard to send something certified mail at the post office, really. But how's this going to keep the Warriors off your back?"

"Blackmail." I grin at her pause. "It's nothing all _that_ clever, but I intend to make sure they know how hard I can bite back. The two of us together can do more than I can alone."

"You want me to mail...what you're writing now, to a Judgment Tether, if they kill you?" She's a little mind-damaged, but not an idiot. Nik chews on her lip, and leans back against the wall with her arms folded. "What if they kill you before you can explain?"

"Then while I'm in Limbo I'll be comforted by the knowledge that they're getting a little pain in return." The Kyriotate seems unhappy about this, so I put on the smile meant to be reassuring. "Consider it a valuable learning experience for them. Maybe next time they'll think twice about forcing some Renegade to do their dirty work for them, and turning on him in the end."

"And what are you learning out of this?" Nik drops back onto the bed, leaning over my shoulder as I write. "...that's not for Judgment. That's not in _English_."

"Nope. This is for the Nightmares Tether. If War wants to go harass them, don't you think it's fair that Beleth should know who to get angry at?" I'm pushing what Nik's willing to do for me, but I don't know enough about how Heaven's infighting works to rely on that alone. It's been long enough since I bothered to write anything in Helltongue that the glyphs feel unfamiliar to me, throwing me off as I translate back from English syntax and vocabulary to what's properly my native language. "Besides," I say, as she's hesitating, "two lines of attack are better than one. I'd be going for three if I were sure who the angel they killed during the attack was a Servitor of."

"...wait, what?" She swings herself around, and I suddenly find myself with a lap full of glaring Kyriotate. "Say _what_?"

"The Elohite shot some angel during the Tether raid. I'm fuzzy on the details, but the Mercurian in charge was throwing a fit over the matter. Don't worry, I'm not mentioning _that_ part in the version I'm sending to Nightmares." She stares back at me, wide-eyed. "What, did you think I could blackmail them over hanging out with me? Even if Judgment gets upset over every little imagined fault, I don't think they could cause many problems for Servitors of a hostile Archangel over that."

"They shot another _angel_?" I sense Nik is having trouble with this concept. "You're sure?"

"Can't see why they'd pretend otherwise in front of me, so that's the conclusion I'm sticking with." I settle my arms over her shoulders, no matter that she smells faintly of dried vomit and candy-flavored alcohol. "I know Judgment's one of your least favorite Words out there, but it seems appropriate to let them know."

"They shouldn't--I can't believe they--okay, I can _believe_ it, but I wouldn't think--" Nik presses her forehead to my chest, shaking, and I wonder if all her hosts are or only this one. "Stupid, stupid, _stupid_ , why would they do that? What sort of goal's worth that?"

"Hey. Nik. Calm down, okay?" She's curled up in my arms, and I don't know what's set this off. It wasn't anyone she knew. "Yes, it was stupid of them. Yes, this sucks. And this might be the only thing that keeps me alive."

"We ought to tell someone," Nik says, mumbling into my chest with a cigarette-scarred voice, and I can barely make out her words. "It's not _fair_. They're not supposed to do that, they shouldn't be allowed to."

I do not need her freaking out on me. "Sure, we could do that." I sigh down over her, and don't let go. "At that point I'm screwed, because there's no way telling Nightmares who hit them will keep these Warriors from killing me, but I can't do this without you. You think we ought to tell Judgment regardless, I'll write it up for you to send off to Dominic's kids." She turns still in my arms. "I mean, maybe Sean's right, and some time in Limbo would do me some good. We can work out a way for me to find you once I'm in a new vessel. Maybe I could try an animal vessel. It'd be a change of pace."

"No, I don't--I didn't mean that." Nik sits back, wipes her nose with the back of a forearm. "You're right. If that's what you have to get these assholes to lay off, you should use it. If we run it straight to Judgment, they'll insist they're being treated unfairly again. Bunch of arrogant bastards." I'm not clear on whether she's referring to Judgment or War there: possibly both. "You get things written up, and I'll take them someplace safe, and I'll keep a close eye on you. If they hurt you, I'll make sure they regret it."

"I don't know what I'd do without you, Nikostratos." I'm being honest in that, and the Kyriotate favors me with a shaky smile. "I owe you twice over."

"Don't worry about it," she says, standing up. "I'm no Lilim. Let me know how I can help, and I'll do the best I can."

I flip to another page in the pad. "So let's see if I can get this ready before I end up dead."

Nik disappears into the bathroom to clean up her host while I finish off the first report and turn to the second. The one for Judgment I put in my best English, the kind of dry, to-the-point prose I used for proposals back when I had a Role I liked and designed flammable buildings for a living.Working for the Demon Prince of Fire means "likelihood of going up in flames and taking everyone inside with it" rates higher than "sturdily-built" or "pleasing to the eye" in building design.

The really _fun_ part about the report for Judgment is that I know it'll be read by at least one Seraph, possibly more, and that means wringing out information I didn't even know was there. It's a pity those Warheads didn't stop anywhere with surveillance cameras Nik could grab the tape from, but I can describe current vessels, and all sorts of helpful information I've picked up in the company of angels. If Judgment can't work out which three angels to ask pointed questions of from what I've written, the organization doesn't deserve to be running Heaven's not-so-secret police.

After a moment's reflection, I decide against putting my name at the end. They might find out anyway, and make the connection, but I'd rather not let that "Sorry I dropped a building on your heads, except for the part where I'm sorry, because I'm not" incident get in the way of an unbiased reading of my report. I do make sure I'm up-front about my reasons for sending them the information. It's important to know the writer's bias in a work of non-fiction.

I make a second copy of the plain-English explanation in case we find out who the Traumatized angel worked for, and fold the three sets of paper separately. Nik comes back out of the bathroom, toweling her hair dry. "Everything ready?"

"Unless I can work out how to get pictures for those vessels, I think so. Don't suppose you have some hidden talent at drawing?"

Nik shakes her head. "I didn't get a good look at them. By the time I tracked down what'd happened to you, it was evening. Never saw them in good light."

"It was worth a shot." I pass her the three sets of paper. "Nightmares. Judgment. And the third's for whoever that angel belonged to, if we can figure it out. My first guess is Destiny, but that's only a guess."

"And now what?"

"Now you go take those to _extremely_ safe places, and keep an eye on me while we wait for War to show up. If I end up dead, send them out." I pull her close to kiss her on the forehead, and the smile she gives me answers a question I didn't ask. "No running your hosts into danger to rescue me this time, understand? If I end up dead, I end up dead. And be careful. They know there's a Kyriotate out there."

"I haven't lasted this long by being careless," Nik says, and heads to the door with the reports ready. "But I'm keeping an eye on you from above." One last look for me, a shy smile, and then she's out to put away her current host and get things delivered.

I turn on the television, kick back on the bed with the legal pad, and amuse myself by designing the shoddiest, most flammable buildings ever to be built to code while the latest Media nonsense blares away in the background.

When the door slams open, I check the clock on the bedside table. "You realize I've been waiting for you to show up for some five hours? I expected you at least two hours ago. Have to say, I'm disappointed in how long that took."

"Hi," Sean says, bright smile and a gun to my temple. "Want to give me a good reason not to shoot you?"

"See, this is why they put you in charge." I turn off the television, then let the remote crumble into shards of plastic and metal in my hand. "When you show up to talk to someone you were trying to kill and he greets you in a friendly manner, this is a clue that something is up. Congratulations, you're not a complete idiot."

"We _could_ just kill him," Molly points out. I flash her a grin. Love you too, babe.

Sean takes a deep breath, that metal ring against my head not wavering in the slightest. "Leo," he says. "Why don't you tell me why I shouldn't shoot you?"

"That's an _excellent_ question, Sean, and I'm glad you asked." I favor them all with a brilliant smile, the one I use when I need to charm someone's socks off and do my Impudite impression. "Let's keep it simple, because I wouldn't want to confuse anyone. You met a friend of mine early this morning, right?"

"The Kyriotate. Which I'd like to know what you're _doing_ with, but right now, I'll settle for the rest of this story." His smile's icy, and as authentic as--no, wait, that's actual amusement I'm feeling right now. My smile's more authentic than his. What are the odds?

"Right. Well, I hooked her up with useful documents. You shoot me, and three interested parties suddenly know a lot more about what you were up to last night." Tessa's as blank as ever, Molly's staring at me in a way that says she hasn't quite gotten it yet, but Sean? He understands. The look of dawning horror, badly suppressed, is a thing of beauty, and I wish I had a video camera right now because I haven't enjoyed anything this much in months. I'd like to be able to relive this moment again, and again, and again...

"You wouldn't," he says.

"Try me." I look to Tessa. "You want to tell him how serious I am right now? Elohite like you would know if I was bluffing." She shakes her head. I look back to Sean, and he doesn't seem concerned about details like the gun not being pressed to my head anymore. "See? I'm not bluffing. So how about we make a deal?"

"You expect us to deal with you _now_?" Poor little Mercurian's gotten all angry on me again.

"Not necessarily. I figure there's a fifty-fifty chance you'll shoot me outright. But in that case, I'm no worse off than I was when I last saw you, plus, I get the warm fuzzy feeling that comes from screwing over someone who set out to do it to me first." My smile's beatific. "It's all your choice now, Sean."

He has some decent self-control when he puts his mind to it, I'll grant him that much. Sean finally manages, while Molly's pacing is making a rat-a-tat rhythm in the background, to say, "How can I trust that you haven't already sent out this information, or that you won't if we do what you ask?"

"Do you have a Lilim handy? Some Trader who can whip up a binding contract? No? Then I guess you have exactly as much assurance that I'll follow through on my promises as I had that you would on yours. Of the two of us, I'm the one with the better record."

He can't hide the disgust. "Because you were forced to."

"We made a deal. I kept my half." I get rid of my smile, because it's not entertaining me anymore. "In the last few years, I've dealt with Judgment, Trade, Flowers, and...you. Of all these encounters with angels, you're the only ones who didn't keep your half of the bargain. Now, call me naive for assuming angels were trustworthy. I was drawing conclusions based on insufficient data, and believe me, I know better now. But I'm not the one in this room with the shaky credit history." I slide off the bed, while Sean's gun moves to aim at me, and tuck my hands in my pockets. "So here's the deal. You keep to your _original_ half of the bargain, and if Judgment comes by to ask questions about what you did last night, it won't be my fault. Or you can shoot me, and my friend will make sure various Tethers get the details on what all of you did last night."

Molly stops in front of me, vibrating with contained anger. "You have no right to do this."

"And you had no fucking right to drag me off the street for your pet schemes!" I shout in her face, and she twitches back. "If you needed a Calabite so badly, you should've jumped. Bet your Archangel could fix you right up again. I was minding my own damn business until you three decided to drag me along." I tone back down to pleasant and light. "Which brings us to where we stand now. Leave me alone, or deal with the consequences. Or, knowing you three, spend some time working out how to screw me over without any negative consequences." I shrug, and move towards the door. "Which if you can figure it out, go for it. That's how the game works, isn't it? It's not about which of us might be right or wrong, it's who's better at _winning_." I open the door, and toss them one last smile over my shoulder. "I'll probably be seeing you around again. Or maybe I'll be dead so fast I won't know you were there. Either way, nice working with you, hope I never have to again."

They let me walk away, and I stroll off through the parking lot while Nik wheels overhead. It's not going to last. But one point for me.


	6. An Interlude, In Which The Enemy Is Not Incompetent

Tessa sat on the park bench, staring straight ahead, while Molly paced around her in tight, anxious rings. "He hasn't said anything in half an hour," Molly muttered, looking over to where Sean was still giving his empty coffee cup the stare of death. "This can't be a good sign."

"He's thinking," said Tessa.

"Thinking? Yeah. Thinking. Thinking would have been nice back when you decided to--" The Ofanite's head snapped around as she looked for listeners, and she continued in a lower voice. "When you decided to go deal with problems the _efficient_ way."

"It was necessary to make a decision quickly. Given subsequent events, it may have been the wrong decision. I was working on limited information." Tessa's hands lay folded in her lap. "It would not help him for me to apologize further at this point, and so I do not."

Molly hissed out an irritable breath, and stalked over to the other bench. "Sean. What are we doing next?"

"He's going to _kill_ me," Sean said. "No. He's not going to kill me. He's going to demote me and stick me in Heaven for a few centuries until I can carry out a mission competently, and I think I'd rather he killed me, because I'm supposed to be _competent_ \--"

"Oh, get over it," Molly said, and leaned over the back of the bench to poke the Mercurian. "What's done is done. Moving on. What are we doing about this now?" She poked him again when he didn't respond quickly enough. "You're in charge. Be authoritative. Make decisions. Make _bad_ decisions if you have to, not like the Power hasn't already covered that for this job, but tell us what to do."

Sean pressed two fingers to his forehead. "Research," he says. "I think...that he might hold off on sending out that information for a time, but we can't count on it lasting, so we want to move quickly." He looked up, and pointed to the Elohite. "Head back home and get more data from that kid. _Better_ data, based on what new information we have. See what you can dig out from its old experiences with the Destroyer. Details it overlooked, biases we need to clear to get better data."

Tessa stood up and walked away. Sean sighed. "Okay, that's one place. Where else? We don't have any other old coworkers handy, I don't think trying to track down _other_ demons for interrogation will end well."

"Look into the Kyriotate?" Molly suggested. "If we can figure out who it is, we'll have a better chance of catching it and recovering whatever information it holds."

"Good plan. One I should have thought of," Sean added.

"It's been a long day," said Molly. "Try to focus, and think happy thoughts. You know. When we finally get to shoot him."

"That's sounding like a happier thought all the time. Right. Head back up, start digging on known Outcast Kyrios, especially any thought to be in roughly this area. Or who might be..." He sighed. "I don't know. What kind of criteria translate into making friends with a _Calabite_?"

"Couldn't say, sir. Maybe he seduced it?" Molly shrugged, and pushed off from the bench. "I'll be right on it. What are you going to do?"

"Judgment, Trade, and Flowers, he said. One of these things is not like the other ones..."

"One of these Words might have a chance of giving us information without interrogating us half to death over why we want it or refusing outright, yeah," Molly said. "But Trade is...well. Trade. They don't give out info for free, especially if we don't tell them why."

"I know, I know." Sean held out his hand, and got the car keys in return. "But I have a bag full of potentially useful artifacts, not _all_ of which are earmarked for other projects, and there's always my winning smile, right?"

"Which has worked how well so far?" Molly threw up her hands. "You're a Mercurian. Trade likes Mercurians. Maybe it'll work. I'll keep you updated if I find anything useful. Good luck."

"I'm going to need it," Sean said, and dropped the keys into his pocket. He stood up, deposited the coffee cup in the trash can. "Call me as soon as you find _anything_. We want to work fast."

Molly shrugged, already working out the best way back to the Tether in her head. "I'll do what I can, sir."


	7. In Which Even Sympathy Has Its Conditions

The phone card's been in my pocket for long enough that all the print on the back is worn away, but I memorized the numbers months ago. It's taken me half an hour to track down an actual pay phone, the type that gets rarer every year. Traceable, but easier to deal with than keeping a disposable cell phone working. Small electronics carried on my person for long periods of time don't fare well. This phone stands in a bus terminal, deserted at this time of day. I make my way through the number-punching sequences to use my phone card, and wait.

"Hello?" No introduction when I call this number: it's the private line for the Tether, not the public one. I recognize Perle's voice, a friendly sort of Cherub who has reason to dislike me and could probably beat me into a pulp if it weren't dissonant for her to do so.

"Hey. It's Leo. Can I talk to Iris?" I lean back against a graffiti-coated wall and watch people pass by on the other side of the street. Quiet place, this time of day, with everyone inside working or off doing whatever it is kids do when it's summer vacation. Try to drown each other at the community pool or watch TV.

"Just a minute." She sets down the receiver on the table, and I listen to muffled conversations in the background while my phone card minutes slip away.

"Hello, Leo." Iris sounds the way a Mercurian should, warm and sympathetic before I've said a thing to him. Only angelic Seneschal I've ever met and continued to like, though I'll grant I'm working from a sample size of three. "What prompts this call?"

I don't want to say this. I really don't want to say this, and I don't even _like_ Flowers, all the peace and love and happy green plants stuff gets on my nerves really fast. "Is that offer you made still open?"

"It depends on the circumstances," says Iris, perfectly polite. "What sort of trouble have you found yourself in?"

"I can't be asking for a place to stay because I like hanging out with you so much?" I try for light, and end up with something hinting at desperation. Dammit. I need to work on my acting skills. It's been a long day.

"It seems unlikely. But if you want to claim that's the case..." He leaves the invitation to lie to him open.

"Not really." I have this sliver of credibility, built up from telling the truth to people who might decide to help me, and I'm not about to waste it on salvaging my pride. "Short story is, War's annoyed at me right now, and I could use a place to lie low where they're not likely to storm in."

"And this is different from your usual situation how?"

I take a deep breath. Somehow, talking to Iris always makes me feel like a kid caught with his hand in his mother's purse. "Not...the War. War. The Heavenly version."

"Mm." I can make out the sound of tea being poured. "That's a new set of problems, yes. And how did that happen, Leo?"

"It's a long story."

"I'm not going anywhere."

"...and I'm in a bit of a hurry."

"So summarize."

Like I'm a _kid_. It's embarrassing. Not the way he talks, because he's reasonable even when he's firm, but how I react. I don't know how I got hardwired to feel guilty at the sound of his voice, but I'd like to get over it. "Three Servitors of War dragged me into some secret project of theirs, they screwed up along the way, now they want to kill me to keep me from telling anyone."

"Mm. I see." I wish he'd sound more surprised. "How is it that they haven't managed it so far?"

I should've guessed he would catch that. "I made sure people they don't want to know about this would find out if they do kill me. I take attempts on my life personally. But they'll find a way around it, they're not stupid enough to trust the matter to my dedication to keeping my end of a bargain. Which is why I could _really_ use a place to stay for a while."

"Do you intend to keep your end of the bargain?"

"Not telling anyone what they did?" I rip pages from the battered phone book, weighing truth against safety. "I'm not sure. They've broken their promises to me. I might be better off getting what revenge I can now before they find a way to guard against it, because they're sure as hell going to find a way to kill me as fast as they can."

"Drop it."

"What?" I pause with half a page of R's in my hand.

"Drop it. Leave your plans of revenge, give up on getting back at those who've tried to hurt you, and you can stay here. I'll even send someone to find you, if you've wandered far, which I'd think you would have by now." Iris sighs on the other end of the line, spoon clinking against his cup. "We are not a refuge for wayward Renegades who wish to avoid the consequences of their actions."

"I'm not trying to avoid consequences, I'm trying to avoid getting _killed_ , and right now, blackmail's all I have to do that, Iris."

"It's given you breathing room. Leave it at that." Iris sets aside the spoon, a tiny clink from far away, silver on ceramic. I know what that kitchen looks like, smells like, the way the beer in the fridge tastes. But that's not any home I should wish for. "Violence leads to violence, and vengeance to more vengeance. Throwing yourself into a cycle of retribution will not free you. It will trap you further inside the cycle. If you wish to break out, you may come here. But I will not set this Tether as a ward around you so that you can thumb your nose at someone you've slapped back."

"And that's the ultimatum? Learn to turn the other cheek, or deal with War myself?"

"That's the condition for being granted sanctuary here, yes." Iris takes a sip of his tea, a pause long enough for me to think this over. "Can you do that?"

"Can I think about it for a while?" Telephone book pages crumble into dust silently in my hands. I'm not trying to get out of any circle of violence, I just want people to stop being violent towards _me_. If that means not hurting people first, I can work with that, but letting them get away with this? Not so much. It makes no sense or satisfaction.

"If you change your mind, you can call again. If you're able." From him, that doesn't sound like a threat of what'll happen to me if I don't join the flower power cause: it's only a statement of probability. "Were you going to ask after Katherine?"

"I wasn't planning on it." Humans wander by in front of me, but no one stops, and the one bus that's come by so far hasn't even stopped to let passengers off. "Where is she?"

"Day camp. Ling's an assistant counselor there this summer, so it seemed safe. She's been doing well in classes, though she gets into fights with the other children. It's improving."

"It'll take time." I taught Katherine how to break things, set buildings on fire, play with guns. Okay, the guns were Regan's fault. The kid's about as screwed up as two demons could make her, for all that I took care of her as well as I could manage. It was so _useful_ to have a cooperative human around for avoiding disturbance.

"Important things usually do." Footsteps in the kitchen, and a brief, murmured conversation with Perle that I can't make out. "Do you want me to let her know you called?"

I don't know what they've told her about me. I don't know if I could stand to be back there in that Tether if she knew what I was, what I am. And I don't know why it should matter to me. "If you think it's a good idea. Look, I'd better go. Thanks for the offer."

"You have my number," Iris says. "Call whenever you need to."

I hang up, catch the next bus that deigns to stop, and spend the ride thinking about things other than Flowers and vengeance and kids who might or might not know that I'm a demon.

On the third stop, Nik gets on, body of someone new, but she heads right for me and drops into the seat beside me. She's some teenage kid wandering through the town with nothing better to do, all dressed up and no place cool enough to go. "It's all set up," she says. "But it's not going to work forever."

"Not forever." One of her hands rests on top of mine, and I let it.

"So what next?" As if I'm the one in charge, where we used to only be two acquaintances willing to meet for lunch and complain about the trials of a runaway life. I never wanted management positions. I don't want to be responsible for more than my own life.

"I don't know, Nik." We rumble to a halt at a red light, and out the window nothing is giving me any clues of what to do. "I really don't know."


	8. An Interlude, In Which People Won't Leave Me Be

Sean waited on the comfortable lobby couch, checking his watch, briefcase at his side. He'd had to stop by a store to dress appropriately and acquire a briefcase, but it seemed a worthwhile expenditure. The last three days of bouncing from Trade Tether to Trade Tether, working his way through the chain of information to someone _useful_ , was proving the decision correct. Traders appreciated someone who could dress the part, look them in the eye with a firm handshake, and be up front about what he wanted in a trade.

They also haggled like horse-dealers. The Mercurian considered what he had left in the briefcase, reviewed the budget for the project in his head, and suppressed a wince. If this wasn't the final stop, he'd be writing IOUs soon, and Traders could _enforce_ those.

Sean took a moment to hope this would be one of those missions Michael stored in memory pearls once all loose ends were tied up. He didn't want to remember this one.

A tall man in a dark suit stepped into the lobby, offered a hand as Sean stood up. "Mr. Daily? If you'll follow me." Sean shook hands, read the social lines of a man who knew the name of everyone in the building and most of their spouses and children, practiced at the shooting range three times a week, knew himself to be an insider here and the Mercurian an outsider. Soldier or an angel with a well-maintained Role he wasn't sure, but Sean put his opinion more heavily on the latter. After a few centuries, one began to recognize the intense look of another angel taking the opportunity to resonate.

"Thank you for getting me an appointment on such short notice." Sean followed the man up the stairs, and noted the way this presumed-angel avoided the elevator. "I apologize the abruptness of the request--"

"I can see why you'd be in such a hurry," said the man, with a certain sharp note to his words. Sean revised his estimation from "presumed-angel" to "presumed-Malakite." No doubt being blackmailed by a demon would show up on the list of recent dishonorable deeds. And botching a mission. And being complicit in the death of an angel of Destiny. And failing to tie up loose ends, and...well. Quite the wealth of failure for any Malakite to pick up on. He kept quiet until he'd been shown into the office of the person he'd come to meet.

The Seneschal, an Elohite according to his data, stood up to shake hands as he entered. "Sean Daily. Thank you for the time."

"Let's get down to business," the Elohite replied, and the Malakite stepped out to close the door.

"You no doubt have some data already based on the questions I've been asking elsewhere--"

"I'd prefer to hear it from you," the Elohite said. "From the top."

The words were well-rehearsed by now, and tested to pass casual inspection by a Seraph. "In a recent assignment of mine, sensitive information came into the possession of a Renegade demon. I need to reacquire that information before he can pass it on to Hell or otherwise compromise security. I believe this demon, a Calabite of War, formerly of Fire, has come into contact with Trade before, and I'm looking for information that will help me recover the data."

"Do you have a name for him?"

"Leo. He may have been claiming to be a Calabite of Fire when you dealt with him, or...possibly an Impudite, depending." Sean waited, sitting straight in the chair he'd been offered, the briefcase on his lap. He couldn't get a resolution reading off this Seneschal yet, which meant the conditions of the conflict weren't sufficiently defined. "I'm willing to pay for useful information you can give me about past dealings with him."

"You would have to be," said the Seneschal. She leaned back in her chair, balancing a pen on her fingertips. "How, exactly, did this demon come into possession of sensitive data?"

"I can't talk about that without revealing more sensitive data, now, can I?" Sean smiled more confidently than he felt. "All I'm asking for is information that'll help me get it back. It's a reasonable request, and I'm willing to negotiate a fair price in exchange."

"When we negotiated a deal with this demon," said the Seneschal, and it was a moment of a surprise that she wasn't bothering to deny that, "our half of the contract included not setting anyone else after him. If you want to know where to find him, by the terms of the contract, I _can't_ help you with that."

"We don't need help finding him. Only information about him specifically." Sean held his smile, and hoped that she wouldn't ask why, if they could find the demon, they were having trouble recovering the data.

"We may be able to deal, then." The Elohite leaned forward, putting down her pen. "I believe the best course of action would be to assign you a period of time from the angel who dealt with this demon in our brief association. He'll have the most complete data."

"That's what we could use. How soon can you get him here?" The conflict between the two of them was minor, more a friendly deal than a debate, leaving the details of resolution still hazy in his mind. It didn't seem likely to break the expense account. Sean gave himself one small bonus point for thinking to grab more artifacts than the ones they'd been sent to find. There was nothing quite like an expanded budget for dealing with loose ends.

"A few hours. Maybe a day, if he's engaged in other projects." The Elohite tapped at her keyboard for a moment. "We can expedite the process for an additional fee, but let's see what you have to offer for this service."

Sean snapped open his briefcase, took out one of the two spare artifacts he had left. "A talisman we picked up recently. Do you think this would be sufficient?" His attunement told him maybe, and the Elohite's expression gave him no answer as she picked up the silver bracelet to turn it about in her hands. "I'm told it's an aid for seduction. Not really my area."

"It might be useful," said the Elohite, "but it's not much. Do you have anything else?" She spoke politely, and left unspoken the knowledge that he was not bargaining from a strong position.

Sean left the talisman on the desk, and pulled out the last relevant item in the briefcase. "The Song of Dreams," he said, and set the whole piece on the desk, chains jangling against each other and the long spikes meant to rest on the end of someone's fingers. He'd tried it on once to get a feel for what it might do, all the links settling into place around his wrist and hand, and removed it promptly with an uneasy feeling from how warm and comfortable it lay against his skin. "Celestial version. It's also some sort of talisman, though we haven't determined what type."

The Seneschal picked up the artifact. "Interesting," she said, and running her fingers along the edges. "Not directly useful, but I could find a buyer. For how long will you want this angel's help?"

"With luck? Only a day or two."

The Elohite set down the artifact, and gave Sean an arch look. "I'm asking for a hard upper limit. Time, as they say, is money, and we're not giving you the help of a valuable Servitor indefinitely."

"Call it a week," Sean said. "With the lesser artifact left in your care as surety in case we run over the time limit."

"It's a deal," said the Elohite. "If you go over two weeks, we'll begin sending pointed messages." She smiled at the Mercurian. "Easier than you expected?"

"I'm waiting to find out the catch." Sean closed the now-empty briefcase.

"You wanted something specific, and had a good idea of what I'd want in return. Simple enough. Where can we find you when the angel's ready to accompany you?"

"I'll book a room at the hotel down the street," Sean said. "Please give me a call as soon as he can show up."

"We'll send the Seraph right over," said the Elohite.

Sean used his recently-acquired practice and maintained his smile. "So this Servitor's a Seraph?"

"Yes. If you want to deal with the demon you can find and can't simply kill, you may find one useful. They've dealt with each other before." The Elohite leaned back in her seat, fixing Sean with a steady gaze. "For some reason, this Renegade demon seems to _like_ dealing with Seraphim. It may be nothing more than a transferred fondness from the Balseraph he used to work with."

"Hard to say," Sean said, and stood up. "Thank you for your time."

The Seneschal nodded to him, and let him show himself out the door.


	9. In Which I Am Philosophical

Nik meets me in the park with coffee I didn't ask her for, and a bag of bread for the ducks. "Hey," she says, and takes a seat on the bench next to me. "What are you working on?"

"Nothing important." I set the notepad aside, on top of the copy of _Wuthering Heights_ that hasn't kept my attention. The Bronte sisters had their moments, but melodrama isn't to my taste right now. "And on your end?"

"Those look like floorplans," she says, depositing the coffee in my hand and leaning over to look at the notepad. "Designing something?"

"It's just a hobby." Getting a job as an architect without a Role, a degree attached to said nonexistent Role, or getting immediately pounced on by the War? Unlikely. With my luck Stone would track me down and get personal, too. "How's she holding up?" Nik's back in her usual host, who I'll admit doesn't look as physically run-down as she did the first time I saw this body.

"I wanted to talk to you about that." Nik tosses out a handful of breadcrumbs into the pond, where overfed ducks meander over to see if it's worth their time. "There's a problem that's come up, and I was hoping you could give me some help. Figuring out how to deal with things."

"If I can help, sure. But it's a good idea to limit it to ways that won't be thrown off-track if I end up dead in the next week or so."

Nik grimaces. "Don't talk like that. It's been a few days. Coming up on a week. Maybe they'll leave you alone."

"We know how good War is about giving up on grudges. Tell me about your problem." I slouch back on the bench and wait for Nik to put together her story. It's a nice day, blue skies and pale wisps of clouds, enough of a breeze to keep things from getting too hot. I'm not looking forward to the inevitable trip to Limbo. You wouldn't think it would be so much to ask, to do what I wanted for a while on the corporeal plane. I'm not setting anything important on fire, I'm not killing anyone, I'm staying well out of the idiot War between Heaven and Hell. But neither side's keen on the idea of people doing what they want, as opposed to what Superiors want.

"So," the Kyriotate says, turning her own coffee cup around in her hands. "There's this...custody issue, that's come up. Her husband wants the kids back. He's married to this other woman, they can't have kids, and he says he could provide a better home environment. Just because he has more money, and two parents for them instead of the one."

"And it has nothing to do with her being alcoholic and occasionally physically abusive."

"She's getting better!" Nik snaps, flicking braids about as she shakes her head. "You don't know what it would do to her, to lose them. It's the only reason she holds together as well as she does, for _them_." She throws another handful of bread out for the ducks. "Anyway," she continues, in a calmer voice. "I found her a pro bono lawyer to represent her when it goes in front of the judge. But I was hoping you could help. I mean, when I still thought you were an Impudite, I was going to ask if you could just, well, get to know her, show up as a sort of stable father-figure to prove she's not handling it all alone, but I'm not sure if that works now. So I'm hoping you can help me with a better plan."

She waits for me to come up with something, earnest and trusting, because of course I've done so _well_ in everything else lately. Nik, I'm not the sort of person you should ask for help in figuring things out. Not until I can get my own life sorted. In the tree that gives this bench shade, a sparrow hops from branch to branch, staring out at whatever might be sneaking up on us from behind. I like this Kyriotate, and not only because she's willing to risk dissonance to help me out. But I know how easy it is to assume that because you mean well, your decisions are good ones.

"Let it be," I say.

"What?" She turns on the bench, one knee drawn up under her chin, to stare at me, baffled. "No, seriously. I need help with this."

"Let it be, Nik. Let her do whatever she decides to do, and let things happen the way they happen." I'm happier staring out over the ponds, for all that looking at her would give me more useful data. "Think about it. You were considering asking an Impudite to Charm this woman into a relationship, because you thought she'd have a better chance of keeping her kids. Think about that long and hard. Asking a demon to use his resonance on a human you've been watching out for, for her own good."

"I know it sounds like that, but it's for a good reason," Nik says. "And you're not an Impudite, so you can just be...normal-charming, I'm sure you could manage, it wouldn't be hard--"

"No." I raise a hand when she opens her mouth, hate the gesture for the arrogant motion it is, but I'm trying to talk. "When you're considering those tactics, you've lost sight of the goal. Tell me, Nik, what do you want out of this? Why are you trying to do this for the woman?"

"It's better for her."

"No, it's something she _wants_. There's a difference."

Nik throws up her hands. "You can't tell me having her kids taken away would be good for her! She'll fall apart completely!"

"How? You haven't let her. You haven't let her make any decisions. Maybe it's better for her kids to spend time with their real father rather than someone pretending to be their mother." She doesn't get it, she really doesn't get it. "Look. Maybe having her kids taken away is exactly what she needs to show her that she's been failing miserably, that she needs to change."

"She has been changing--"

"No, _you've_ been changing her behavior. You can't change someone by force, Nik, not in any way that's good for them. You can show them how to change, or ask them nicely, or try to persuade them, but you can't force them to be better people." She looks like she's about to burst into tears, or shout at me and run off, so I temper my voice. "Think about it, Nik. How's she going to hit her destiny if you've been living her life for her? It doesn't count if every good decision she's made has been you in her body, and nothing she did of her own. Give her a chance to make her own choices."

"But what if she does the wrong thing?" No shouting yet, that's a good sign. "If I let her take over, she might screw it all up again."

"It's her life to screw up. And they're her decisions to make." Please understand what I mean, Nik. I don't want a Shedite for a friend. They're not nearly as useful. "Look. Why are both of us here? Because we decided to make our own choices, and roll with the consequences, instead of doing what we were told for forever and ever to the end of the world. Choices are meaningless if no matter what you do, someone else rewrites everything to fix your mistakes and give you a happy ending. Let her make her own choices, and let them _matter_ , as much as you had the right to make yours. Maybe she'll keep the kids, maybe she won't, but how she gets there will be something she does."

"I don't want to let go," Nik says, and now she is crying, sticky tears rolling down her face. "I've been trying so hard to fix things."

"So you gave her a chance. That's something. Maybe she can remember pieces of this time and remember how good it was to not be drinking her life away, and maybe she'll stick to it from there. But we're talking about an actual person, not a vessel and a Role. It's not your life to take over and live however you decide is best."

Nik wipes tears away on the back of one arm. "So why do you care? You're a demon. Aren't humans supposed to be toys to you?"

"As much as ordinary demons are to Demon Princes, sure. Maybe I can identify. I don't like getting jerked around, so it stands to reason other people wouldn't want to be either." I grab a handful of crumbs from her bag, and toss them out to the complacent ducks, who care not at all about more food. "Did I ever tell you about my ex-girlfriend, Regan?"

"Don't think so. You've been pretty good about not talking about your past." A touch of an accusatory tone there, which is fair. It's harder to be friends with someone when they discuss their past atrocities.

"So let me tell you about her. Regan. Balseraph of the War. Moderately intelligent, as arrogant as most Balseraphs are, excellent fighter. She's gorgeous. And when she knows what she wants, she sets out to get it." I toss out another handful of bread. "She decided I ought to be working for the War, not Fire. After all, her Prince was this amazing general with grand plans, while mine was, so far as she could see, a destructive fool who couldn't think past the physical limits of his Word. She used to tell me that I deserved better. And one way or another, she got what she wanted. Had me transferred over into temporary service of the War, then permanently." I look back at Nik. "At which point I broke my Heart and ran, because I couldn't imagine anything I wanted less in life than to be bound to the War. I don't think she ever understood. She knew the War was where I belonged. How could I not see she was right? She only wanted what was best for me."

Nik sits beside me quietly, the tears drying. When she speaks again, it's so quiet I can barely make out the words. "You really think I should let her...sink or swim."

"Let her live her own life. Yes." I'm not sure how convincing I've managed to be. "Nik, I've known people who live humans' lives for them. They're called Shedim, and I don't think you want to be one of those. _I_ don't want you to become one. Let go while you still have a chance. Please."

"So I can spend more Forces watching out for you?" That question is...unexpectedly not hostile. As if she'd take that into serious consideration if I said yes.

"No, so you can avoid taking more dissonance." I grab my notebook again, and scribble out a number and address on a blank sheet of paper, rip it out to hand to her. "This? Is a Flowers Tether I hid out at once. Nice people, not really my style. Send a bird that way and work off your dissonance. Hell, send all your Forces that way and stay some place where you won't get hit with the fallout when War comes back to kill me, because I'm guessing it's going to be messy. They know you're in the area, they know you're helping me with this, and that means they'll hunt you down and find a way to neutralize you. Think that's going to end well for any of your hosts?"

"Why are you giving me this?" she asks, and she won't take the paper from my hand. "Do you want me to leave?"

I take a deep breath. "Nik. You're the only friend I have, and I would love nothing more than for you to stay and help me. But it's going to get you hurt. I'm going to end up dead _anyway_. Hide out with Flowers, and let me deal with the consequences of my actions, okay? Because the only thing you'll do if you stay near me is get yourself hurt." She stares at me, and still won't take the damn paper. "This is a selfish decision on my part, because I want to look you up again once I'm out of Limbo. Just take the information and go. Flowers, Nik. Being nice is their whole schtick. They won't let War near you."

"How would you find me again?" She takes the paper, stuffs it into a pocket without looking at the information. "I always look different, if they kill you then when you come out of Limbo _you'll_ look different..."

"I'll call the Tether and leave a message. Like I said, nice people. You can do the same. We'll work it out." Get out of here before I change my mind and ask you to stick around and help.

Nik stands up, solemn-eyed. "If I send out those documents, they'll kill you."

"They will anyway. Do whatever you want with the papers, I don't care. I got my cheap thrill out of the threat."

The Kyriotate leans forward, and kisses me, light and hesitant. "Be careful," she says, and walks away. No promises. I noticed that part, Nik.

The sparrow in the branches watches my back for me, but I can pretend to be fooled if it'll make her happy. I pick up my notebook again, dump the rest of the bread into the water for the ducks, and go back to working on building designs that'll never amount to anything.


	10. An Interlude, In Which These People Just Won't Leave The Issue Alone, Will They?

"My apologies," said Solveig, when it entered the room. The Elohite was smaller than most angels, with wide eyes of pale silver. "I would have responded sooner, but I was involved in a project. How may I help you?"  

Tessa looked up from its desk, and pointed to a seat. "More questions about the demon you once worked with."  

"It was a brief association," Solveig murmured, taking the seat indicated. "I doubt I have more to offer you."  

"Nonetheless. There may be data we overlooked that could prove useful." Tessa flipped on her PDA, and pulled out the stylus. "We'll begin at your introduction, and proceed chronologically."

  Molly spun into the room, fiery rings jittering about her with frustration. "Okay, do you have _any_ idea how hard it is to dig up some of this information? And I'm talking records about Outcasts just from the Words who'll _speak_ to us, much less the ones who don't want to talk to me because of my affiliation like that makes any sense and I got _completely_ shut out when I tried to talk about it with Flowers, can you imagine if we're actually dealing with a Kyriotate of Flowers? The kind of embarrassing that would be?" She stopped, spun around to orient herself more towards the young Elohite across the desk. "Oh. Hi, Solveig."  

"If you're looking for records of Outcasts, it would be most efficient to ask Judgment for information," Solveig said. 

 "Funny you should mention that," Molly said. "Except not. Um. Right. I'm back to looking for the records, good luck on the interview, hope you find something useful, bye?" And she whirled out before anyone could ask awkward questions.

  "It's difficult to practice deception in Heaven," Solveig observed. "But not impossible."  

"Entirely true," said Tessa. "Now. Let's return to when you first met Leo."


	11. In Which My Life Gets Complicated. Yes, More Complicated. Seriously, I Know What I'm Talking About Here.

Sean shows up when I'm in the middle of lunch, and takes a seat at my table without asking. "This is an awfully public place to hang out," he says.

I gesture at him with a forkful of steak. "Makes it less likely that someone will walk up and shoot me. I consider that a feature. What are you doing here?"

"Like you have a better excuse than I do to be here?"

I shrug, take a swig of my beer. "Maybe I'll save someone from choking and be a hero. Again. You're only here to harass me. Of the two of us, I have the better excuse."

"We need to talk." He's making a real effort to be polite. I have to admire that, or maybe only wonder why. "Some place more private."

"Some place better for the rest of your friends to jump me? I don't think so." I finish off the last of my steak, and reflect that they don't know how to do good barbecue in this state. "What do we have to talk about? You and yours stay away from me, I don't tell people things you'd rather they not hear. This isn't rocket science, Sean."

"I want to renegotiate. A better deal. I don't trust you."

"And with good reason. I mean, look at all the times I've lied to you, broken my promises, not kept up my half of the bargain..." I choose not to mention that I've put all those write-ups in Nik's many hands, to do with as she'd like. But I don't think he'd be pretending this reasonable demeanor if she'd already sent them out.

"I want it in _writing_ ," Sean says. "And I want you to be able to tell a Seraph that you fully intend to keep your half of the bargain."

"That might be doable." I carefully don't pause while reaching to finish the last of my beer. "Huh. That might complicate matters."

"...what?"

"Oh, nothing much. Only someone just walked by outside and pretended they didn't notice me while looking through the window. I'd guess another hunter from the War or the Game. They show up on occasion. You wouldn't believe what a pain it is to get them off my tail when I can't just shoot them, or hook them up with a car bomb." I finish the last of my beer, and wave down my waiter for the check. "Can you break a twenty?"

"No," Sean says, turning back from where he's been looking out the window. Not that he'd be able to spot the man _now_. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"Means I'm tipping more than usual, that's all." I drop the twenty on the check, and stand up. "Now if you'll excuse me, I have a little problem to deal with."

Sean follows me out through the restaurant. "How do you expect to deal with this when you can't kill anyone?"

"Silly Mercurian, murder is for amateurs." I take a left when I step outside, watch to see who's paying attention. Different person that before, and then as I walk down the street someone else again, a slow, subtle ripple of attention following me. Shedite, then. Those can be tricky. "I can't outgun the War, so getting into an arms race is stupid, doubly so with my Discord. I have to outthink whatever they've come up with this time, if I want to keep on not losing the game."

"And how do you intend to win this time?" Sean's clever enough to have caught on to the Shedite as well by now, and I wonder what he thinks about killing humans to get rid of a Shedite. Never mind. Neither of us could. We're the worst anti-Shedite team ever.

"This isn't a game I can win. That's the Game's job, or maybe the War's. I continue to not lose for as long as I can." I stroll down the street with my hands in my pockets. Sean's hands are in his pockets too, but I suspect he has weapons in his. The deadliest thing I'm carrying is a felt-tip pen. "This time, I figured I'd let you come up with a plan. You know your limitations better than I do, you have a good idea of what I can do, and you have reason not to want me dragged off somewhere by the War."

"I'm not sure 'want' is the right way to put it," Sean says. "It would be entertaining. Briefly."

"Now you're seeing things from my point of view." I grin at him, two friends walking down the street together with a Shedite in tow. "Life sucks, then you die. But there are occasional chances for joy along the way, when you make someone who wants to hurry the 'then you die' part share some of the 'life sucks' part."

"Are you always this optimistic?"

"Can you see a reason to not be?" I look up overhead, and there's Nik, pretending to be a pigeon who just happens to fly the direction I go. "My life's been sunshine and hugs, Sean. I see no reason why it'll ever change."

"Life's a war, and you're on the wrong side."

"I'm only on my side. If that's the wrong one, there's no escaping it." I've lost track of the Shedite for the moment, in a press of crowd with multiple people heading the same direction as we are. "I don't suppose you have the aforementioned Seraph handy?"

"Here, I'll just pull one out of my pocket," Sean says. "No, I don't have a Seraph handy. Turn left at the next light and we can head for the car."

"Right, because it ended so well the _last_ time I got into a car with a bunch of angels."

"Do you feel compelled to make snide comments about everything I say?"

"I get my fun where I can." I turn left at the light, watch the bump of pedestrians behind us in the reflections of store windows. "So. Do you have a clever plan, yet?"

"Maybe." Sean takes another left, and I stick close enough to keep the matter of who's leading who unclear to anyone watching. "Do they only send one hunter after you at a time?"

"No, not by the time they've tracked down my location. That wasn't an accidental notice. There'll be another one, maybe two, besides the Shedite." The pigeon overhead's still following me, and Nik's doing a lousy job of blending in with the local fauna. I think stress makes her careless.

"How do you deal with them? You can't have survived this long on luck alone." Sean's voice turns clipped and military as he gets into the swing of assessing the situation on a professional level, which is exactly how I'd like him to view it.

"That would be telling, wouldn't it?" Besides, it's embarrassing to admit how much of it _has_ been luck. Zigging when my pursuers zag, finding exactly the right distraction to let me slip away, getting tracked down by one of Regan's attempts, where she wants me captured rather than dead. It's easier to kill someone than drag them back home.

"Incoming," Sean says, as a pedestrian who's failing to look nonchalant turns the same way we do as Sean leads further from the main drag. "Tell me, do you have _any_ real combat skills?"

"Not particularly. How do you feel about dealing with Shedim? I get the impression your Choir's not very good with them." It seems something of a disadvantage that Michael's Mercurians, unlike Baal's Impudites, don't receive a get out of dissonance free attunement when it comes to doing in humans. "Where are you heading?"

"Back to the car, for reinforcements. I'm not sure the Seraph _can_ reinforce anything, but numbers help. If we can't get that far, there's a junkyard that'll provide a convenient place to deal with this problem out of the range of too many humans. It'll remove some of the Shedite's advantage."

"And let you break out the heavy weaponry without alerting the locals, right." We're still strolling along at ordinary speeds, while the Shedite ambles down the street behind us. If he has partners, they're either about to show up or working their way around from another direction. "Please tell me you brought heavy weaponry."

"Don't you want to try to figure it out with the powers of your mighty, mighty brain?" I think Sean's taking certain comments of mine too personally. "Let's leave it as a surprise."

"Now, correct me if I'm wrong, not having the combat experience you do, but do plans for dealing with the enemy that begin with 'Let's leave it as a surprise' usually end well?"

Sean shrugs. "Considering how well the plans that were spelled out ahead of time have been working lately..."

"Oh, come on. Your plan was working fine, that bloodthirsty Elohite aside, until you deviated from our agreement. You were doing a good job of adapting on the fly. If you hadn't overcorrected--"

"You would've run off with all that information, and used it at an unknown time in the future to buy yourself an escape from a run-in with Judgment or the like."

I have to admit he has a point there. "In my experience, Judgment isn't so big on plea bargaining."

"How did you end up working with Judgment anyway? They're not the type to deal with demons. Or reason. Or sanity. But I digress." Sean takes a right, and I can make out a rusty sign three blocks away for Little Suzie's Junkyard. It would be enough to give me flashbacks to the time I showed Katherine how to completely destroy a room, if I weren't so busy counting down towards likely encounters with Limbo.

"Let me put it this way. I'm a Calabite. An Ofanite of Judgment happens to pass me on the street..."

Sean snickers. "That must have been entertaining."

"For _someone_. Though I did manage to hold off the Seraph with honest answers for a few questions. I mean, my Discord _was_ the Discord my Superior had given me, and I did serve Fire... It broke down when they asked after a Choir."

"I wish I could have seen it," Sean says. "How did you get out of that one alive?"

"I didn't. But I dropped a building on them when I went." We'll not bring up how Regan talked me into it, or I tasted dissonance for that one. It's one of my fondest memories, despite the aftermath.

"If I didn't want you dead so badly, I think I could almost like you," Sean says. He glances over his shoulder, but we are running low on time. "Two more, besides the Shedite. I think this is our stop up ahead."

"Call the Seraph and ask it to meet us there?" I roll my eyes when Sean gives me a blank look. "Don't tell me that you don't carry a cell phone with the number for anyone you're working with."

"Cell phone signals aren't secure."

"See, I'm a Calabite. I have an _excuse_ for not hauling around small electronics. With your Choir, you ought to be tricked out with half the contents of Sharper Image."

"You're thinking of Traders and Sparkies," Sean says, and swings open the public gate to Little Suzie's Junkyard. "I do my shopping from Guns & Ammo."

The bare-dirt yard we step into is deserted, and the sign on the door to the shack tells me business hours aren't being kept; no signs of life in here, aside from the big brown dog snoozing on the other side of the second fence. That one's topped in barbed wire, and the gate is padlocked shut. "Great defensible position, this. If they back us up far enough, not only can anyone on the street see us, we have a dog to bother us."

"Shut up," Sean says, and pulls out a gun that looks like it's used for hitting people as often as it is for shooting them. "Look back there and tell me how close they are." I turn to watch the progression down the street of three people, one of them a Shedite-ridden human and the other two I don't know what, yet. One middle-aged woman in casual clothing, purse slung over her shoulder: that would be the Shedite. One hulking man you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley: Calabite or Djinn, though Habbalite and Balseraph are distant possibilities. The third I can't place: small, wire-thin, dressed in ragged clothing and of an unplaceable gender.

"One block," I say, and Sean's gun goes off, ripping through the padlock with enough force to sting my legs with shards of metal. "Oh, sure, no one's going to hear _that_."

"If the police show up, you can explain," he says, and yanks the remains of the padlock off to open the gate. Inside, the dog opens its eyes, and tilts its head up at me. Hi, Nik. "Do you have a better plan? And stay close, I know you have the combat tactical skills of a reliever of Flowers."

I stick close to him, and wonder how we're going to deal with the Shedite when I can't kill anyone and Sean can't so much as slap a human. I'm not fond of Impudites when violence is necessary, but I'd take one over a Mercurian in a situation like this. Nik follows us, cropped tail wagging, trying to look like a perfectly ordinary friendly junkyard dog. "My plan involves not being backed into a no-exit location by the enemy. But we're using your plan this time. I look forward to being impressed."

Sean leads me behind a wobbly stack of crashed cars, the ones at the bottom so old they're red with rust. "Here's the plan," he says. "I'll shoot anyone who isn't human, and you stand in the back and try not to die an inconvenient manner."

"Or," I say, "I could use my resonance to shred the junk at the bottom of this already perilously-balanced pile, and topple the stack onto them if they get too close."

Sean frowns at me, settling down into a good firing position. "You can do this without dropping the pile on us?"

"Architect, Sean. Give me credit for having basic knowledge of physics." I settle behind him on the bumper of an SUV that had an unfortunate flip, by the looks of the roof.

"And your Discord won't object to dropping that many cars on them?"

"They work for the War. They're probably tough." He looks over his shoulder to narrow eyes at me. "I can work with 'probably'."

"It's a plan, then," Sean says. "Shedite's going to be tricky. If we can knock out the human--"

"You can jump celestial and do your awesome battle over there, right. And by 'we' I'm guessing you mean 'me'." I lean back on the hood of the car, and watch Nik in the sky above while she watches the battlefield below. She flops down in front of me in her dog host, tail still wagging. "What if one of the other two's a Hellsworn?"

Sean adjusts the aim of his gun. "Then I'll find out the hard way."

"You're sure you're a Mercurian? I mean, I could have been working under some assumptions based on badly-interpreted data all along." I pull a cigarette from my jacket, and light it, let it burn between my fingers as we hear the junkyard gate open and slam shut. "This would be a really convenient time to find out you're a Malakite who's been faking the white feathers."

"Tell you what," Sean says. "You prove you were lying about that inconvenient Discord of yours, and I'll burst out with the black wings."

I slide across the bumper until I'm no longer in direct line of sight from the other side of the stack of cars. "Try not to kill anyone on the first shot, okay? Because then I'd feel obliged to stop you on the others."

"I'll keep your delicate sensibilities in mind," Sean says, and fires another shot at I can't see what.

A rush of disturbance from somewhere beyond the stack, and then a creaking sound begins up above us. I look up. "Sean?"

"A little _busy_ here."

I stand up, and begin backing away, no matter that this is putting me more in the line of fire. "It occurs to me that we might not be facing the War. Look."

The top car of the stack pulls itself up, twisted metal stretching itself out into four lumpy legs, and it grins down at us, bumper turning into a clownish smile. Sean looks up. "...oh," he says.

The car slides down the side of the stack, and lands between us. A door slams open in my direction, faster than I can get out of the way, and I tumble into a pile of metal scraps before I can start working on a reaction. I settle on the classic plan B, pull myself to my feet, and run like I'm being chased by Nightmares.

The back fence proves a problem. Nik bounds along beside me, barks, and goes darting to the left. It seems prudent to follow the one person in this tussle who can see the whole battlefield. Sean shouts, a strangled cry that's followed by louder disturbance, and one more shot from his gun. I follow Nik to a half-hidden area behind a ruined camper. "Shedite jumped him?"

Nik woofs sadly in response, and nods. Turns to the left, pauses, darts back to the right, and then looks up at me with startled eyes. "Act _normal_ ," I whisper, and wait to see who's coming around both sides of this camper at once. Nik scrambles down to cower beneath the tilted, rusting bottom of the camper.

The first one to appear is the bulky man, swaggering with his hands in his pockets. He looks me up and down from a few yards away. "Wrong one," he mutters, but doesn't leave.

"You know, if you're just looking for _him_ ," I say, not daring to back up yet, "go ahead and take the guy. He's not a close friend."

The demon tilts his head at me. "Nah," he says. "Might as well haul you in too. Might be useful." He lumbers forward, more Djinn in his motions than Calabite, and I start backing up. "Might be good for making him talk."

The disturbance from out in the rest of the yard builds in waves, most of it from physical damage; I'd guess Sean's doing his best to stay away from the Shedite. "No, seriously. The man hates me. If anything, you'd annoy him by letting me get away."

"But you were walking together," the demon points out. "Better to be sure. We'll take you in."

Nik whines, under the camper, and I hear the sound of metal moving in ways it wasn't designed to. The demon smirks, and I give him the satisfaction of seeing me turn to look behind.

That's...mostly one car. A strange lumbering beast made out of pieces of other things, clinging onto the frame of a battered sedan like they've been glued together by a toddler with rage issues. Perched on top, the thin creature--ethereal spirit, I'm guessing--looks down at me with unnatural silver eyes, sharp-nailed fingers dug into the roof of its ride. It regards me with a distant, impersonal hostility, and clatters closer. "Gotcha," it whispers, in a raspy voice.

I take a cigarette from my pocket and light it. Look up at the spirit. "Does Nightmares pay you that well?"

"We let it live," says the demon behind me, stalking in closer. "More than some pissant spirit deserves, after getting too close to us. It knows what to be afraid of."

I meet the ethereal's eyes, and smile. So charming. With a stay-down gesture for Nik behind me. "Doesn't seem fair to me," I say. "Two against one. With odds like that, anyone would go down hard."

The spirit tilts its head, into an angle that would make humans wince. Not much used to wearing a vessel, I think. "Those are the odds," it says, still in that raspy whisper. "No matter how you divide it. Two against one."

"That's _exactly_ what I'm saying," I tell it, and gesture emphatically with my cigarette. The demon's taking his own sweet time stalking up behind me, to inspire the appropriate sense of dread. "And does that seem fair to you? I mean, of all the things I could be doing right now, or that _you_ could be doing right now..." I flick ash out towards the camper. "I get tired of being pushed around with death threats, sometimes."

"One more time, then," says the demon behind me, speaking directly into my ear. "So sorry. Life's not fair--"

Whatever he meant to say after that gets lost in the grinding crunch of some part of a car engine I can't identify slamming into his face.

I take the moment of distraction to slam my elbow into the demon's throat, leaving him gurgling and clawing at his own face. "Quickly," hisses the ethereal, as its ride bows down beside me, "kill it before it can speak."

Nik's latched onto the demon's leg now, white teeth digging deep, and I ought to be able to do...something. I don't know what. I _can't_ do this, the cracks in my soul keeping me still when I want to act. I hate this Discord. "How--"

The car-creature lunges forward past me, drops in a single crunching motion onto the demon. There's a brief whir of motion deep below that I can't even interpret, and then the car stills. I couldn't have stopped that if I'd _tried_ , even my Discord put on pause while trying to understand this. The ethereal pulls its long fingernails out of the roof, and looks down at me. "Not much help," it says.

"Not much help? How long have you been doing what they say?" I climb up onto the roof of the heap of car-parts, and wonder if that's Sean who's shootingnow. It sounds like a different gun. "Control collar?" The ethereal wraps a protective hand around the loose silver chain dangling around its neck, and frowns at me. "Let me guess, he had the other end. I'll see if I can grab it. Can you move the car off the body?"

"Not now," it says, watching me with sullen, suspicious eyes. "Costs too much to do that often. They make me use _my_ Essence, every time."

"And I'd guess you can't get far from the control, either." I climb back down. Nik paws at a messy red patch beneath the car. "Give me a minute and I'll see if I can pull it out of here."

"You aren't going to help your friend?" The ethereal clambers down beside me, climbing head-first like it's more used to moving on all fours. "They say it's an angel that can't hurt humans. They say it'll be trapped. They say they'll drag it home and pull it apart slowly, and find out who hurt them."

"They say a lot of things." I pull a car door off the pile. "Item the first, he's not my friend. Item the second, he can jump celestial and ignore the Shedite or go back to Heaven for reinforcements if he's _really_ pressed. Item the third, did I mention he's not my friend? If one lousy Shedite can do him in because of his dissonance condition, I find that hilarious."

"Your sense of humor has always been lousy," Sean says, and limps towards us. "Okay. Do I even want to know why you're digging through car parts? And why this thing isn't trying to chew through your throat or something?"

"I don't know. Do you?" I get down on my knees to reach into the mess of body and machine, run my hand along a bloody arm until I find what feels like a bracelet with a gem set into the band. It's easy to resonate the arm now that the vessel's owner is dead, and I pull the bracelet out from the gooey remains. "How did you handle that Shedite?"

"Backup finally showed up," Sean says. He leans against the camper, and fixes ethereal and Nik both with a sour glare. "He's calling for an ambulance for the woman he shot--"

"Told you cell phones were a good idea." I stand up, and sigh at the completely ruined arm of my jacket. "Dealing with demons is so hard on the wardrobe."

"You have it," whispers the ethereal. It crouches beside me on the heap of the car, leaning forward to peer at the bracelet. "Life isn't fair. Now I follow you?"

"You have a name?" I ignore Sean for the moment, to look at this creature in a mostly-human vessel. I haven't dealt with ethereals before, but they can't be that much weirder than celestials.

"They called me--" It stops, and looks at me again, in a more appraising manner. "Ferro. That's my name."

"Well, Ferro, it's nice to meet you. My name is Leo." I drop the control bracelet into its lap. "I'd recommend staying quiet if you're not heading back to the Marches, because people like my not-friend who's glowering over there kill ethereals who wander through Earth. Have fun."

Ferro stares at me blankly, silver eyes dull in the shadows. Then snatches up the bracelet, and darts off to the back fence, climbing expertly over the barbed wire. I turn back to Sean. "So. You said something about a Seraph?"

The Mercurian shakes his head slowly. "What are you _on_?"

"What?" I shrug, and walk back through the junkyard. "I have issues with getting pushed around. So sue me." Nik walks serenely by my side, but I don't think Sean's fooled. "I'd guess the next order of business would be getting out of here before the authorities show. In a place this small, it can't take long for the ambulance to get from one side to the other."

"I wouldn't think so," says the Seraph, as he stands up to where I can see him, and nods politely to me. "Leo."

"...Penny?"

"That is what many people call me." Penny wipes his hands clean on a handkerchief. "Intercessionist, the human is in stable condition, and the Shedite may be returning with reinforcements. Furthermore, the amount of disturbance caused during the battle--"

"I get the idea," Sean says. "Let's get to the car."

I shut up and try to work this through in my head while we're doing so.

"I gather you didn't expect to see me," Penny says, once Sean's peeled away from the curb at a speed that would do an Ofanite proud. The Seraph sits in the front seat, texting someone on his cell phone as he speaks with me.

"No," I say. "Not really."

"Ha!" Sean slams a hand on the dashboard. "For once, you'll admit to not having seen something coming."

"There's plenty of times I'm surprised," I say, and realize that's nearly a whine in my voice. "I just try to _avoid_ those times." Trade. Why would War hunt down Trade? This implies Sean was _honest_ about wanting to draw up a contract, which doesn't map well to what I've experienced of his demon-dealing tactics so far.

"If you'd prefer not to have met me again," Penny says, tucking away his cell phone inside a pocket, "I apologize for any distress caused by my appearance. But this does not violate the terms of our contract."

"No," I say, and try to see what information I'm missing in all of this, or what assumption I've made wrong. Sean showing up with a few Malakim and trying to beat the location of the stored info out of me? Makes sense. Sean showing up with _Penny_? Not so much. "It's good to see you again."

"And you," Penny says, which is so damned weird I choose not to even think about that, and go back to working out what the hell is going on. I suppose I'll find out soon enough.


	12. An Interlude, In Which Old Acquaintances Are Not Forgotten

"Penny?" Sean asked, the moment the bathroom door was closed. "He calls you _Penny_? You don't find that annoying?"

The Seraph raised an eyebrow, as he set his briefcase down on the hotel room's table. "No," he says. "The nickname is closer to my true name than the alias you've chosen, Intercessionist. Why should I object?"

"I don't know." Sean scratched at the slowly healing wound on his arm. "Most Seraphim do. I'm just confused by your...relationship...with this demon."

Penny took standard contracts and forms out of his briefcase one by one, considering a response. One of the difficulties of human languages was how poorly they marked metaphor, opinion, sarcasm, and storytelling, as distinct from literal truth. "The name I was given is Peniel," he said, laying a pen neatly on top of the stack. "Here on Earth, most people who call me by any name call me Penny. I do not find this worth objecting to. If I should be posted on Earth, over time more people would call me by that name. At a certain point, it would become Truth that my name was Penny."

"It's been a long day. Week, even," Sean said, and he sat down on the chair by the table. "Spell it out for me in small words and simple concepts."

Penny tilted a hand in the air. "Not all change is abrupt," he said. "There are instants of change, but there are also slower processes. I am patient. If a process of change is slow, I am content to leave it at that."

"And that's everything? You're going to let him get away with whatever he wants because you think he might _change_?" Sean rested his chin on folded arms. "You're more tolerant than I can understand. What makes you think this is a good idea?"

"Intercessionist," said Penny, sharply. "You have requested several things of me that were not in our original deal, and I have agreed to most of them. You have given me an entire _list_ of questions not to ask and details not to pursue. Under these circumstances, I don't believe you have any right to object to my decisions on the basis of not having enough information."

Sean shrugged, not lifting his head. "Fair enough."

"That's the idea," said Penny.

They waited in silence for a few minutes, listening to the the shower running in the bathroom.

"He's not redemption material," Sean said. "I tried to give him the option, but I doubt he'd make it through alive even if he agreed. A little weirdness and a helping of Discord do not angelic behavior make."

"I agree," said Penny. "Attempting to push him towards a position of obligatory service wouldn't be a good idea at this point."

Sean leaned back in his chair. "That's not what I said."

"Are you sure?"

"Of course I'm--" Sean stopped mid-sentence. Tapped the table once, while Penny waited patiently. "And you didn't try to arrange more contract work for him after the first incident?"

"According to the terms of the original contract, we weren't allowed to track him." Penny allowed himself a small smile. "He's proven himself to be remarkably adept at bargaining from bad positions, given his apparent lack of training."

"Yeah, tell me about it." Sean looked thoughtful, and the Seraph chose to consider this a good sign. "I suppose Trade doesn't have so much use for a wandering Calabite as some other Words might."

"The architectural knowledge might be of some use, but we seldom have call for demolitions experts." Penny flipped through his stack of contracts, and moved the one on the bottom nearer to the top. It seemed there might be reason to use that variation after all. The sound of the shower stopped, and Penny looked up at the Mercurian. "I warn you at this point that if you lie during these negotiations, I will inform Leo of this fact. I am as loyal to Heaven as you are, but this will not be a fair trade if the negotiator is entirely biased."

"I'll live."

The bathroom door opened, and Leo stepped out, with a brief pause to hang up the towel neatly on the way. "You owe me a new jacket," he said to Sean, taking the second chair across from the Mercurian at the table. "Or did you not catch the part where they were gunning for you?"

"Let's not discuss the specifics right now," Sean said. "The Most Holy has agreed not to look into certain matters."

Leo shrugged, sprawled in his chair as if it were something comfortable. "Good idea," he said. "I mean, if he knew too much, you'd have to kill him too." Penny weighed the joking tone against the faint strand of perceived truth within the statement. Interesting. "So what deal are we going to set up for you to break this time?"

"I've been asked to create a Divine Contract," Penny explained, taking up the first set of papers to set between the two celestials. "You know the consequences of breaking one of those."

"And I'm thinking Mr. Smashy might be okay with taking the damage if it gives him a tactical advantage," Leo said. He flipped through the papers, slid them across the table to Sean when he reached the end. "I thought you didn't have that attunement."

"I didn't," Penny said. "It's a recent acquisition."

Leo grinned up at him. "Penny, version 2.0. Congratulations. Tell you what, if you'll vouch that this guy isn't planning on searching out loopholes or simply breaking the contract for the purpose of getting back at me, I'll consider it as valid as the one with Trade."

Sean spread his hands. "What, you don't trust me?" Attempted an aura of innocence, and found it failing beneath two unbelieving looks. "Fine. I swear that if you sign this damn contract, I will not go looking for ways to get around it, nor will I recklessly break it because I'm just that pissed at you. I can't promise that someone higher-up won't decide to do otherwise, but my strong recommendation will be that this is, by all evidence, a really stupid idea." The Mercurian flipped through the contract, while Penny nodded his approval of what had been said to the Calabite. "Also, this covers circumstances wherein someone from War kills you for unrelated reasons, such as being a demon standing in front of a Malakite. Will you be okay with that?"

"It's expected," Leo said. "If you're not hunting me down, I can take the risks I always have. For my part... I'm going to have to check in with some associates before signing. The documents are out of my hands."

"Feel free," Sean said. "We're not going anywhere."

Leo stood up, nodded to Penny. "Back in a few," he said, and stepped outside onto the balcony, closing the door behind him.

"Can't believe he talked some Kyriotate into working for him," Sean said, shaking his head. "How does he _do_ that?"

"I wouldn't know," said Penny. "I imagine it would be useful. Anyone spotting the resonance of one would be unlikely to expect the other, given the infrequent nature of demons working together with angels. There are also benefits to not being bound to the dissonance conditions of any Superior, in certain types of work."

Sean rubbed the back of his head, and stared up at the ceiling for a moment. "You know," he said, "if you think I ought to float the idea of using him as a subcontractor on a regular basis, you could just say so."

Penny pulled out another contract from the stack of papers. "Did I suggest that?"

"Don't give me that 'did I suggest that', you were practically writing it on a sheet of paper to hold up behind his head during negotiations." Sean leaned forward to grab the contract out of Penny's hands. "I'd have to ask my Archangel for approval. Plus get a binding contract from _you_ promising not to bring this up. And this is all assuming Leo would even be interested."

"I believe he would be. Especially if he could negotiate for the removal of his secondary set of Discord, in exchange for contracted services." Penny checked his favorite pen on one fingertip to make sure it was still filled.

"You seem to know a lot about him, for such a short acquaintance."

"He's talkative when nervous," Penny said. "And he likes Seraphim."

"How can you tell?"

"He told me. Seraphim and Balseraphs both. As I recall, the term he used was 'cute', though he became more descriptive from that point." Penny smiled blandly at the Mercurian's expression. "One night in a Flowers Tether, while waiting to make sure his terms of the contract were properly filled, the Seneschal broke out a second case of Creationer beer. He's talkative when he's drunk."

"Now that I'm going to remember," Sean said, and shut up as the balcony door opened again.

"Good news," Leo said, sliding back into his seat. "She's still more annoyed at Judgment than War, so you're in luck."

Penny...did not look deeply into that statement, despite all his curiosity. "The contract is prepared," he said, and touched it once to bind in the Essence necessary to make it truly effective. "Sign of your own free will if you wish to do so."

Leo took up the pen, and signed the last page, then slid the contract over to Sean, who did the same. "Well," he said, standing up, "it's been nice catching up with everyone, but I'd better get going before the Game shows up to investigate recent disturbances in the area."

"If you'd like," said Sean, and leaned back in his chair. "But I thought you might be interested in a more dealing. So long as we have a Seraph of Trade handy."

The Calabite remained standing. "Because it went so well the _last_ time we made a deal? You have what you want, I'm breaking even. I'm ready to call it a day."

"It didn't go that badly," Sean said, and picked up that second contract to toy with. "The complications came from an over-reaction on my part, not yours, and a poor attempt at correcting that mistake. We might need a Calabite again some day, and we know how to find you. But no doubt the mission would go much better if the Calabite we found were working for us voluntarily."

"I'm not looking to be leashed, Sean. Had enough of that in my last job."

The Mercurian smiled. "Of course not. But voluntary acceptance of contracts... That's another matter. We start from baseline assumptions established before any specific jobs are offered, and work on individual case details from there. No obligation to take a given assignment."

Leo sat back down again. "A demon, freelancing for Heaven? I suppose I could believe it of Michael." Penny watched the Calabite's body language, saw the moment when the idea slipped from the realm of the ludicrous to something plausible. "At the minimum, I'd want to get rid of this Discord, and a promise of daily Essence if I get stuck in Limbo while trying to finish one of your jobs."

"The latter's fair. The former might be harder," Sean said. "The removal of Discord is no small matter to ask for."

"It's inconvenient to _you_ if I have it. I think that entitles me to a discount." Leo smiled sharply. "Think of it as investing in the future."

"We might be able to work something out. A certain number of successful jobs in exchange..."

"And I want the contracts brokered by Trade or a Seraph. If I'm being lied to about the terms, I expect you to go to some _effort_ to do it convincingly."

"Naturally. We'd hardly trust you to your end of the bargain without that. Will you be able to bring in your Domination friend?"

"Maybe. It would cost extra."

"Not too much extra, when it seems she'd watch your back anyway."

"It's the _principle_ of the thing, Sean."

Penny stood quietly beside the table, and listened. It wasn't the ideal solution he could hope for, where one could trade a demon for an angel. That was the most profitable deal. But it was a start. He was, after all, a very patient Seraph.


End file.
